Quoting from NetworkWorld

For the IT staff at Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I., the focus for the last couple of years has been on consolidation. First on centralizing servers that had been scattered across the campus into two physical locations, then on using virtualization technologies to consolidate things even more.

"Real estate is very tough to come by on our campus," says Rich Siedzik, director of computer and telecommunications services at the 3,600-student school. "So we're trying to consolidate and collapse things now into one physical location. We're trying to put them into a much smaller footprint."

To do that, the school is standardizing on IBM BladeCenter servers - running IBM Power and Intel Xeon processors - and taking advantage of virtualization technologies. While IBM Power has virtualization capabilities built in, Bryant University is one of a growing number of organizations using VMware - or other third-party software - to virtualize x86-based systems.

VMware created the market for x86 virtualization in 2001, but industry experts predict 2006 is the year when the technology will finally take off. For one thing, Intel and AMD are starting to roll out chips with virtualization capabilities baked in.

Silicon-supported virtualization will make software from VMware, Microsoft and others run better and let those vendors focus on higher-level management tools. It also will lay the foundation for virtualization tools from others. For example, the open source Xen virtualization technology will support Linux and Windows when it runs on virtualization-enabled processors.

Relegated primarily to test and development environments as recently as last year, virtualization technology continues to advance into production areas. At Temple University in Philadelphia, Tim O'Rourke, vice president of computer and information services, and Frank Azuola, assistant vice president of computer services, are trying to simplify their infrastructure, which now includes about 300 servers.

"During the past 10 years we have experienced a lot of ad hoc growth. We are now restructuring our server environment to help us have a better grip on future growth," Azuola says. "We are now thinking more about integration and simplification than we ever have before."

In the past, Temple typically dedicated one physical server to each application or user group. Today the school of 34,000 students looks to run multiple applications on single physical systems. "We are . . . looking more into server virtualization, which we feel will allow us to operate more efficiently on a daily basis and at the same time provide us with the ability to adapt and grow," Azuola says.

Temple isn't alone. A recent Forrester survey of more than 1,200 companies found that 75% of respondents are aware of server virtualization, 26% have implemented it and 8% plan to pilot the technology within the next year. Of those already using server virtualization, 60% said they plan to increase their use, and 39% plan to maintain current deployments.

Analysts say that organizations without a virtualization plan for their x86 systems will suffer in the long run as those platforms continue running at utilization levels hovering around 10%. Mainframes run as high as 90% utilization and Unix servers average around 70%, analysts say.

"What VMware and other virtualization solutions do is they help push the x86 utilization up closer to the Unix standard - the 70% to 80% range," says Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

For Bryant University, higher utilization rates mean a server architecture that is more centralized and easier to manage. Siedzik says his maintenance costs have been reduced by as much as $30,000 a year. "What we used to run on five or six servers, we now run on one server," he says, noting that some 75 physical servers have been consolidated down to 40. "We believe we can get that down to 30, if not less."

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