Page 140 -

6: A Most-Significant Step—“Virtualizing” Your IT Systems 105

Another plus is that server blades and virtualization can help businesses
make their data centers more environmentally friendly. For example, there
are many cases where corporations would have needed to build a new data
center to support growth, had they not implemented a virtualization strat-
egy. By using virtualization, they’ve avoided the cost of having to build a
big, new data center. A typical example is a business that has perhaps 300
servers that it can’t bring up because the company doesn’t have enough power
in its data center. That business needs to economize. It can eliminate the
need for most of those 300 additional servers with virtualization and blades.
Virtualization with blade servers enables IT administrators to spend less time
managing and reorganizing the data center. The time-savings alone gives
staff the opportunity to explore new ways to help the company grow from an
IT perspective. Based on experience, the time it takes an administrator to
bring up a new server in a data center is substantial. In a virtualized environ-
ment, the administrator can bring up a new server from his desk in a matter
of minutes. IT staff can invest in more productive uses of its time.
Both blades and virtualization are strong enabling technologies for the
level of advanced management that can move us closer to dynamic IT or util-
ptg
ity computing. They offer the ability to pick the computing resources, the
network resources, and the storage resources needed for each project.

Impacts of Server Virtualization on Data Storage

An 2008 ESG Research survey of virtual server users reveals some interest-
ing storage technology and implementation trends. The Enterprise Strategy
Group (ESG) is an IT analyst and consulting firm focused on information
storage, security, and management (http://www.esginc.com). This section
references that ESG survey and relates it to some of the case studies given in
Chapter 9, “Green IT Case Studies for Energy Utilities, “ Chapter 10, “Green
IT Case Studies for Universities and a Large Company,” and Chapter 11,
“Worldwide Green IT Case Studies.” The survey stated that it is well known
that virtualization is one of the hottest trends in IT. But the survey was
intended to show how virtual servers impact end users’ storage strategies.
Virtual servers have unique requirements in the areas of performance and
data protection, and users are just beginning to implement storage tech-
nologies and products that enable them to maximize the benefits of server
virtualization.