KUALA LUMPUR:At a time when every IT vendor is talking about virtualisation as a strategy for saving power, cooling and space costs, none seem to be offering customers a full choice of ways to go about virtualising their IT infrastructure.

Except for Sun Microsystems which offers four different approaches to server consolidation, claimed the company’s regional eco director Mark Stanton.

Virtualisation is the process of separating the pieces of IT infrastructure — hardware, operating system, and applications — to enable these savings. It is not just servers that can be virtualised but also storage, desktops, datacentres, networks and applications.

Sun offers customers options that include putting multiple servers in a common box, different instances of operating systems sharing a single server, different applications sharing a common operating system, or different applications sharing common IT infrastructure resources.

According to Stanton, the unconsolidated datacentre of today runs one server for each application, resulting in too many underused servers and needless costs for power, cooling and space.

Such servers have a utilisation rate of just 15% to 25%, Stanton noted. Consolidating a number of applications to share one server increases server utilisation to near maximum, gets more value out of fewer servers, saves running costs and datacentre floor space, and is more environmentally friendly.

Sun offers different approaches to server virtualisation based on its Solaris operating system, with the ultimate objective of simplifying customers’ IT infrastructure. Each approach to server virtualisation comes with differing overheads — depending on the type of workload, and the scale of the datacentre in terms of users served.

“In Asia, the countries leading the way in server virtualisation are Australia, New Zealand, Japan and India, where three out of five organisations are looking at virtualisation. In Malaysia and elsewhere in the region, the figure is more like one organisation in every five,” Stanton said.

As always, multinational corporations tended to be ahead of other in virtualisation and indeed in green computing initiatives in general, he noted.

These initiatives usually pay for themselves within two years and allow for improvements in provisioning IT resources that can dramatically cut the time needed to deploy new applications — sometimes by as much as from 16 weeks to just half a week, he said.

“In this part of the world, one of the issues is that the skill sets required to handle virtualisation have only just begin to be included in the training curriculum for system administrators,” he explained.

Stanton urged companies here to take the next step in investigate virtualisation further as a means to streamline IT operations, reduce costs, and improve their environmental friendliness.

In the end, he said, “Faster can be cooler, better can be cleaner and cheaper can be greener.”

More information on Sun’s virtualisation efforts is available at www.sun.com/virtualization, including white papers and customer case-studies.