Virtualization

Computing Challenges Today

To meet the constant demand to deploy, maintain and grow

a broad array of services and applications, , IT organizations

must continually add new servers. However, as a consequence

of purchasing more and more servers, organizations

face a growing server sprawl presenting challenges that

include:

• Rising costs. In addition to the expense of adding new

servers, organizations face the added costs associated

with increasing hardware—rising costs for power, cooling,

network infrastructure, storage infrastructure, server administration,

data center upgrades and new data centers.

• Poor return on investment. The common practice of dedicating

a single server to each x86 application and sizing it

for peak loads has led to severe underutilization of server

assets in most data centers. IDC estimates that there is currently

more than $140 billion in server overcapacity, or a

three-year supply of server capacity.2 While servers typically

run at 5-15% CPU utilization, traditional business process

and technology limitations make it difficult to improve

these utilization rates.

• Decreasing manageability. Managing servers becomes

increasingly difficult as the number of servers grows and

the number of applications continue to multiply. Adding

to that challenge is the heterogeneous mix of hardware,

server models, operating systems and configurations that IT

departments need to support.

• Reduced efficiency. As server sprawl increases, IT organizations

are forced to spend more time on reactive tasks

such as server provisioning, configuration, monitoring