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

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 virtual IT world of the future, via grid computing and cloud computing, is discussed. 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.