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6

A Most-Significant

Step—“Virtualizing”

Your IT Systems

“Virtualization can increase hardware utilization by five
to 20 times and allows organizations to reduce the
number of power-consuming servers.”

—Gartner Data Center Conference
November 2007

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The most-significant step most companies can make in their quest for
green IT is in IT virtualization, as briefly mentioned in previous chapters.
This chapter describes the significant concepts of virtual servers and virtual
data storage for energy-efficient data centers. The descriptions include
VMware and other server virtualization considerations. In addition, the vir-
tual IT world of the future, via grid computing and cloud computing, is dis-
cussed. Although the use of grid computing and cloud computing in your
company’s data center for mainstream computing might be in the future,
some steps toward that technology for mainstream computing within your
company are here now. Server clusters via VMware’s VMotion and IBM’s
PowerVM partition mobility are here now and used in many company data
centers. Both of those technologies are described in this chapter.
Based on my experience with data centers for more than ten years, I
believe the most important reason to use virtualization is for IT flexibility.
The cost- and energy-savings due to consolidating hardware and software are
also significant benefits and nicely complement the flexibility benefits.

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