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Advantage: Virtualization

Businesses are recognizing the benefits of virtualization.

The growing benefits of virtualization are commanding more and more attention-and action-from IT and business leaders. A number of surveys show this is a fast-growing trend, with as many as half of the enterprises surveyed reporting they have implemented some form of virtualization or plan to do so by the end of this year. It's easy to see why: Today there are more reasons than ever to embrace virtualization.

Lower costs, simpler IT infrastructures and higher rates of server utilization are just some of the benefits clients are seeking when they adopt virtualization. Just as compelling are disaster recovery (D/R) and business continuity, flexibility, server consolidation, and now energy efficiency as power and cooling issues move up the corporate agenda.

System p* virtualization technology was in action behind the scenes at the recent U.S. Open tennis tournament, enabling the Web site, USOpen.org, to handle record traffic while providing new features to enliven the interactive experience for fans on the Web, including a first-ever live Webcast.

Over the course of the tournament, USOpen.org recorded more than 26 million visits by 6.5 million unique visitors - a 43 percent increase over last year's tournament when 60 servers were deployed for the Web site. This year, only nine servers were required, thanks to new virtualization capabilities on the System p 550 Express models deployed. By consolidating multiple applications and workloads onto far fewer physical servers, power consumption and heat output were significantly reduced while utilization rates went up.

The sophisticated virtualization capabilities available for System p are part of IBM* Virtualization Engine technologies, which draw upon nearly 40 years of IBM's experience in introducing and refining virtualization techniques on the mainframe and later in LPAR capabilities on the IBM POWER* microprocessors used in the System p platform.

Lately, the value of System p virtualization capabilities has been recognized by some important organizations. In July, IBM virtualization achieved one of the industry's most stringent security certifications, Common Criteria's Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL). This is of vital interest as clients run more applications on virtualized systems: virtualization on IBM POWER-based systems provides hardware-based isolation capabilities designed to help secure applications running side by side. In August, IBM Advanced POWER Virtualization - available on System p - was awarded Best Virtualization Solution at LinuxWorld in San Francisco.

With more clients recognizing the multiple business benefits it provides, virtualization is rapidly becoming the norm in many datacenters. By this time next year, we will look back on the first 40 years of virtualization, and look forward to many more ahead.

"With more clients recognizing the multiple business benefits it provides, virtualization israpidly becoming the norm in many datacenters." -Ross A. Mauri, general manager, IBM System p

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