Colleges On Board With Virtualization

Following the lead of corporate counterparts, colleges and universities are adopting the green technology of server virtualization.Server virtualization is the process by which the operations and data of several individual servers are combined into a single, physical machine. In addition to saving space, combining the operations and data of several individual servers into a single, physical machine allows users to reduce the energy spent powering huge racks of centralized computers and the air-conditioning systems needed to cool them.

Last May, IBM invested $1 billion dollars to help companies develop greener data centers, primarily through server virtualization, and other major companies are also on board.

“It’s a pretty hot item,” said Esfandiar Zafar, the IT department’s director of application hosting at Vanderbilt University where somewhere around 150 virtual servers, depending on the day, are running on only a dozen machines.

Still, virtual servers, according to the article, might not be ideal for smaller institutions or for certain departments.