InformationWeek hosts a vendor white paper Data Center Best Practices - Optimizing Server Infrastructure through OS Portability by PlateSpin, Ltd.

Overview:
OS Portability is a technology that decouples the
software stack from any physical or virtual machine and allows it to be streamed over the network to any other physical or virtual machine. This freedom of movement enables users in the data center to move the operating systems and applications to where they can run most effectively, and in a fully automated manner. Matching resource supply with workload demand allows for flexibility and the opportunity to continually optimize the use of existing resources.

While some data centers will adopt virtual infrastructure completely, the majority will be more diversified, having a mixture of physical and virtual environments. As the use of virtual machines in production environments grows, and resource utilization rates increase due to
consolidation and virtualization, there will be a need to balance load between physical servers and virtual machine host servers. OS Portability technology decouples operating systems and applications away from the hardware layer, providing freedom and mobility to physical and virtual machines. It will enable enterprise data centers to balance load, not by customizing applications for clustering technologies, but by moving servers to more suitable hardware infrastructures quickly and easily, matching resource supply and workload demand.

As data centers realize efficiencies in the test lab and high availability environments using OS Portability, they will begin to virtualize some of their production environment in the effort to increase utilization of server resources. Today's data center is riddled with production servers that are sub-optimized which represents a large
opportunity for cost savings.

This white paper provides best practices for optimizing the use of server resources, and how to get the most of out existing server hardware in the data center using OS Portability technology.

To view the white paper, go here.