Federal Roadmap to Your Cloud Achieve Greater Efficiency and Contain Costs Today, the Federal government operates and maintains approximately 2,100 datacenters, with a mandate to reduce that number by 800 by 2015. With virtualization, this goal is achievable, especially because fewer than 15 percent of Federal x86 servers are currently virtualized, according to recent estimates. If agencies undertook a simple 2:1 server consolidation effort, they could presumably reduce the number of physical x86 servers by half and achieve significant cost savings for this basic effort. Their savings potential, however, is much greater, considering that VMware customers achieve average consolidation ratios
server consolidation
Managing the Virtualization Maturity Lifecycle Virtualization demonstrates substantial benefits — in agility, availability and cost reduction — but it is not all clear sailing. Most organizations struggle, sooner or later, with added complexity, staffing requirements, SLA management, departmental politics and more. In fact, most organizations face one (or more) clear ‘tipping points’, where virtualization deployment stalls as they stop to deal with these new challenges. This ‘VM stall’ tends to coincide with different stages in the virtualization maturity lifecycle — such as the transition from tier 2/3 server consolidation to mission-critical tier 1 applications; or from basic provisioning automation to
Virtualization made its way into the mainstream data center with a strong cost-reduction value proposition centered around a straightforward tactic: server consolidation. Now, on the back of the success these projects achieved, virtualization is gaining a more strategic role in the IT landscape. As virtualization initiatives delivered tangible bottom line benefits–in some instances up to 60% reduction in capital costs–companies looked to virtualize more. With expanded use, virtualization becomes more than an operational tactic; it becomes the foundation for a new approach to IT. An approach where IT services are freed from the complexity of the hardware infrastructure that delivers
