By investing in virtualisation software, a small US college eliminated about one-third of its physical servers and sidestepped about £190,000 for new systems, even as it added enterprise applications.

The server consolidation at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, grew out of a limited test of ESX Server, virtualisation software from EMC subsidiary VMware. Initially, the IT group wanted to use the software to create virtual servers that could be dedicated to testing new or upgraded applications before they were deployed in full production mode.

Two years ago the IT group launched a trial deployment. The ESX software is in charge of the physical computing resources -- CPU cycles, memory, disk space -- and allocates these in response to application demands. The applications run in virtual machines, self-contained software bubbles with a claim to the underlying CPU resources on the blade.

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"The IT staff came to me and said, 'We think we can deploy everything on VMware,' " Davis recalls. Bowdoin bought 15 HP BL20 blade servers. Eight blades run ESX Server instances, with a ninth instance running on a Dell server. The IT staff was able to reduce the number of physical servers from 72 to 46 (including the 15 HP blades).

Today, Davis says 58 per cent of Bowdoin's applications run on virtualised servers. The 15 HP blade servers cost $93,000 (about £49,400). VMware's ESX pricing for the education market is $3,000 (about £1,600) per server, which can each support multiple virtual machines, for a total of $27,000 (about £14,350).

Antonowicz says that to support the new applications deployed, 57 additional physical servers would have been needed. But as a result of using virtualised servers, Bowdoin bought none apart from the blades. Antonowicz estimates the 57 boxes would have cost $356,250 (about £190,000)...