CDW White Paper Sample

A solution to the disarray of server sprawl: virtualization. The concept is nothing new -- mainframe systems have employed virtualization techniques for four decades. But it has emerged as an exciting answer to the modern computing environment as well. In the past decade, vendors such as VMware have applied virtualization technology to x86 servers, allowing companies to reign in the unmitigated growth of their distributed environments. And many companies are now discovering that virtualization can solve problems across the IT environment, from dwindling floor space and soaring energy consumption to inflexibility, low utilization rates and downtime.

Consolidation: tame the growth

Growth is welcome; sprawl is not. By consolidating hardware, you can slow the physical proliferation of servers, even as business applications and data volumes grow. Virtualization technology allows consolidation ratios of 3 to 1 and higher. Some companies may even be able to fit the workloads of five, ten or 20 servers onto one physical machine.