A September report by Computer Business Review found that 36% of the 300 UK IT executives surveyed had either already gone down the virtualization route or planned to do so soon.

Over half the respondents (54%) had implemented server virtualization, 35.5% had installed or planned to install storage virtualization, and 24% had virtualized their applications.

Chief benefits were seen as flexible management and provisioning (54.58%) and increased utilization rates (41.22%). Decreased power consumption was also signposted by 33.5% of respondents.

Last week, a Butler Group report identified significant cost savings by employing virtualization, estimating that firms could save 78,000 pounds ($159,000) for every 1,000 PCs a year by replacing the full desktop PC kit with a server-hosted desktop virtualization set-up. Additional savings of 4,000 pounds ($8,155) could be made by using self-service virtualization technologies to reduce help-desk calls.

While storage consolidation was the initial impetus behind virtualization, Butler found that organizations were now seeing its potential as a strategic technology. It was making them rethink their whole infrastructure and break the rigid links between applications, hardware, middleware and platforms.

Within two or three years, Butler predicted that virtualization would be the dominant data center technology.

Read or comment on the original article from Computer Business Review, here.