Now Is The Time For All Good Companies to Virtualize …

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Now Is The Time For All Good Companies to Virtualize …

Could virtualizing your company’s servers actually be part of your patriotic duty? It may seem a little far-fetched at first glance, but let’s take a deeper look at national trends and the important take-aways from recent national political campaigns that drew a bead on our country’s most pressing problems: a teetering economy, our alarming dependence on foreign oil, and a growing need to address environmental concerns such as global warming.

Is there something IT professionals can do that has the potential of addressing this triple threat of social, economic and environmental ills? The answer could be virtualization. Proven technologies that allow a single server to take on a variety of unrelated tasks that would normally require the use of multiple dedicated servers offer some obvious benefits in the areas of cost savings and efficiency. Can those benefits also translate into improved fiscal performance, reduced consumption of energy resources and a lower carbon footprint? The consensus seems to be in the affirmative.

In fact, these are among the reasons Gartner Group recently anointed virtualization as the No. 1 strategic technology for 2009, topping trendier tech topics such as Business Intelligence (#2), Cloud Computing (#3), Green IT (#4), and Unified Communications (#5). In his blog on the unveiling of this year’s Top 10 list, Gartner’s David Cearly cited virtualization’s “significant potential to reduce IT costs” as the primary business driver, noting that widespread IT belt-tightening in 2009 would prompt popular server virtualization technologies to be augmented by an uptick in virtualization techniques applied to storage and client devices.

Next to the promise of cost reduction, energy savings is among the biggest perceived benefits of virtualization. A study performed last spring by independent Washington, D.C.-based research firm KRC Research asked 205 IT decision makers in the retail industry to name their reasons for deploying virtualization in their data centers. Thirty-one percent pointed to energy savings as a major factor in their decision. According to the authors of the report, “The rising awareness of ‘green’ energy initiatives, as well as the increasing power required to run and cool data centers, likely factored into this response.”

So can making each server do the work of several actually reduce a business’ impact on the environment, as well? According to a recent McKinsey report, data centers contribute a substantial amount of greenhouse gases – potentially climbing to a whopping 1.54 metric gigatons by the year 2020, which is 3 percent of all emissions. “The fastest-increasing contributor to emissions will be growth in the number and size of data centers, whose carbon footprint will rise more than fivefold between 2002 and 2020 as organizations in all sectors add servers to meet rising demand,” the report states. Virtualization is one of the primary tools businesses have for reducing data center sprawl and its accompanying carbon footprint.

Given the current economic climate, as well as the new priorities that are expected to be ushered in by the next administration, companies that are “lean, mean and green” will be the most likely to survive and prosper in the year ahead. Organizations that have not yet deployed virtualization need to take a long, hard look at the technology and assess what it can do — not only for their bottom line, but for their country, and even their world.

| Tags: client, energy resource, environment, IT, server, storage, technology, virtualization

By Steve Kovsky on Nov 12th, 2008
6 Comments

Posted by KM Date: November 24th, 2008 at 3:38 pm

Nice to see that one of the companies that started the Virtualization movement (IBM) many many years ago, is helping us make some sense of it today.

Posted by adams Date: November 27th, 2008 at 1:00 pm

i want to join you

Posted by Zane Safrit Date: December 5th, 2008 at 11:19 am

Interesting idea. Interesting marketing scheme: be patriotic, buy our products, we’re american.

It’s eerily reminiscent of The Big Three’s marketing campaigns in the 70’s when overseas competitors offered small cars to combat the oil embargo. As our guys didn’t have the products we wanted, they marketed their wares under a ‘buy american’ campaign.

The obvious points were much the same as here in your article:

Big Three Auto Companies are the number one strategic resource for our economy, generating jobs and manufacturing expertise.

It’s a flagship industry.

We can’t offer a quality product. So, you have to buy us as your patriotic duty.

We did.

Then there was GM’s “made in america” campaign for …wait for it…big trucks of lesser quality.

Then there was GM’s ‘this is our country’ campaign selling…wait for it…big engine, low-mileage cars.

And here we are today, being told we have to buy The Big Three’s story now (the really don’t have any cars we want and we really can’t buy them anyway…). That’s all they have to sell.

I hope this isn’t the start of IBM’s swan song.

Posted by Bill McLean Date: December 6th, 2008 at 9:50 am

Ten years ago I wrote a little book “Virtual Virtue”, that I self-published in 2001. While the thrust of the book’s messages center on not only words, but action, in keeping with Aristotle’s exhortation centered on virtue, its tenor could and should be, applied to any endeavour, especially if one is seeking a successful and satisfying conclusion to such.

” ‘In practical matters the end is not mere speculative knowledge of what is to be done but rather the doing of it. It is not enough to know about virtue, then, but we must endeavour to possess it, and to use it, or to take any other steps that may make us good,’

Aristotle: 384-322 BC
Nichomachean Ethics, X 9.1.
As in ‘Familiar Quotation.’ John Bartlett.”

Posted by Rob Date: December 9th, 2008 at 11:51 am

@Zane – I disagree with your reading of this post. Green is good for the world not just the country. The fact that virtually (ha) all of the major virtualization vendors are based in the US is beside the point. I oversee a number of large data centers and Virtualization allows us to do what we simply could not do before. When we started, we were not even thinking about energy savings. Perversely, I had no incentive to cut energy costs as it was part of a different budget! But, we did save money.

Virtualization is many things but for my group it is fundamentally a matter of flexibility.

Posted by bob Date: December 17th, 2008 at 12:47 pm

interesting points Steve. thanks for the info. I also think the comment by Zane is rite on.