Hello, my name is Dan Chu. I'm Senior Director of Productsat VM Ware. Today I'm going to talk to you about what is virtualization. To setthe stage, virtualization is a trend that is sweeping enterprise IT. Theoverall environment has over seven million servers being shipped worldwide everyyear. Now, out of those over six million of those servers are Intelarchitecture X86 volume servers. Now, these are getting deployed intoenterprise data centers by the hundreds, by the thousands, even by the tens ofthousands into large enterprises.
Now, these are traditional servers with single applicationsrunning on operating systems and they are sprawled out across these datacenters. This leads to tremendous cost in a number of areas in terms ofhardware, in terms of data center and facilities cost, in terms of operational,management and maintenance costs.
Now, to address these overwhelming pressures and costs whatenterprise IT has found as the most compelling tool is virtualizationtechnology. Across these millions of servers the average utilization, theaverage of each of these environments, these applications is 5 to 10 percent.These servers are barely utilized across the environment. 90 to 95 percent oftheir capacity isn't being used on average.
So what virtualization technology does is it allows you totake advantage of that as well as some very fine grain technology to run theseenvironments side by side on a much lower number of physical servers. Toillustrate that, we take these environments-it could be databases and businessapplications, e-commerce applications, web servers-and you can take them downand consolidate them to a much smaller number of physical servers. Each ofthese environments now runs side by side on a single machine and each of themis fully isolated and fully encapsulated.
To show you what that means, each of these servers, what youhave here, what you had in the physical environment, there's a hardware layer,there's a virtualization layer that enables all this. And then on top of thatyou have each of these environments, whether they be a database or anapplication server or a domain controller, they all have their separateoperating systems-it could be Windows, it could be Linux, it could beSolaris-and on top of these each of these applications run side by side andeach of these server environments has its own CPU, has its own memory, has itsown Ethernet NIX, has its own disk. And so they run in isolation just as theywould in a physical environment.
Now, what does this mean for an IT customer? It means thatyou get tremendous savings. On average, the kinds of consolidation ratios thatusers have seen today range on the order of 10 to 1, 15 to 1, even 20 to 1,meaning that customer data that's running 800 servers or was running 800servers in a physical environment can now consolidate that down to a numberlike 60 servers. And the benefits of that in terms of hardware, in terms ofdata center, the ROI is tremendous. On average customers are finding that thereturn on investment they're getting is in less than three to six months.
And in addition, it also completely changes how customerscan provision their applications, provision their server environments. So ifyou take how you initiate a new service or a new application before, puttingthis out into your data server took a number of weeks to procure the hardware,to install the OS and patch it, then to deploy the application and configurethat. Now because all this is in software, instantiating this takes a matter ofminutes.
