VMware Highlights Cost and Environmental Benefits of Virtualisation

By Greg McNevin

May 8, 2008: According to VMware, with companies using virtualisation to consolidate ten or more physical servers into a single machine, power use is being reduced by 80 to 90 percent, saving large amounts of money and tonnes of CO2 emissions.

The company claims that its customers that have moved from a 1:1 application to server ratio to 60:1 or higher have achieved millions of dollars in capital and operational savings.

It says that for every server that is virtualised, around 7,000 kilowatt hours (kWh), or four tons of CO2 emissions, can be saved every year. With this figure in mind, and more than 6 million server workloads since 1998 being virtualised by the firm. It claims that the technology has saved nearly 39 Billion kWh, or roughly US$4.4 (AU$4.66) billion to date.

In terms of emissions, this translates to roughly the total energy consumption of Denmark over one year.

What’s more, the company says there is still much to be done with the technology, and more savings to be made as PCs virtualised and hosted in data centres can reduce power consumption and cost by 35 percent, while virtual desktops can double the replacement cycle of PCs and thin clients, further reducing the environmental via less hardware turnaround.

“Most servers and desktops today are still consuming 70-80 percent of their rated power even when idle,” says Stephen Herrod, chief technology officer for VMware. “VMware is able to deliver substantial power and cost savings through innovative power management capabilities in our virtualisation solutions that safely power down or throttle servers when not in use.

“By powering down servers and desktops during inactive periods such as evenings or weekends, we can help customers save another 25 percent or more on power consumption without affecting applications or users.”

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