Scalability and IT Infrastructure: Thousands of businesses are using VMware virtual infrastructure software running on Intel processor-based servers to consolidate their infrastructure, streamline their test and development environments, reduce their total costs, and respond more quickly to shifting application and workload requirements. Next-generation solutions will deliver increasing value, as both VMware and Intel continue to push the boundaries of current technology, while working together to deliver optimized solutions that provide better value in today’s complex datacenters.

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Thousands of businesses are using VMware® virtual infrastructure software running on Intel® processor-based servers to consolidate their infrastructure, streamline their test and development environments, reduce their total costs, and respond more quickly to shifting application and workload requirements. Next-generation solutions will deliver increasing value, as both VMware and Intel continue to push the boundaries of current technology, while working together to deliver optimized solutions that provide better value in today’s complex datacenters.

Intel® Virtualization Technology is being integrated into Intel processor-based clients to deliver enhanced hardware support for these solutions, and to help accelerate future innovation. Intel and VMware are also working together to explore potential new usage models that may help to improve security and manageability, and reduce costs, across the client infrastructure.

The High Cost of IT Operations

IT operations accounts for 80 to 90 percent of a typical enterprise IT budget. One source of these costs is the large number of underutilized servers in the typical datacenter. In the past, IT organizations have tended to host just one application per server. Given the affordability of industry-standard servers, this was a cost-effective strategy that simplified deployment and reduced potential software conflicts. Yet server numbers have increased worldwide by nearly 150 times in the past decade, and so have the costs associated with maintaining these systems.

Average server performance has also increased. Today’s servers are ten times more powerful than those of a decade ago. VMware virtual infrastructure software helps IT organizations take advantage of this extra power by consolidating multiple applications and operating systems onto a single Intel processor-based server, to increase utilization and reduce management, power and cooling requirements. VMware solutions also enable fast and flexible allocation and reallocation of resources, so businesses can respond instantly to growing capacity requirements, workloads spikes and system failures. With these capabilities enabled on affordable, industry-standard servers, many IT organizations are reducing their server-related costs (both capital and operational), while simultaneously improving datacenter agility (Figure 1).

The potential benefits are not small. In a study conducted with several of its enterprise customers, VMware documented the following cost savings via virtualization and consolidation:

• Hardware cost reductions: 28-53 percent
• Operations cost reductions: 72-79 percent
• Overall cost reductions: 29-64 percent

VMware customers are also realizing up to 20 percent savings in software licensing fees. Of course, cost reduction is only one measure of business value. By simplifying and accelerating new application development and deployment, VMware software running on Intel processor-based servers is also helping companies extend and adapt their computing solutions more quickly. That helps to provide faster time to value for new implementations, and establishes a more agile computing infrastructure that can be instrumental in improving overall business agility.