If you do the math, it is staggering the amount of money saved in the datacenter through server-hosted virtualization. Virtualization not only provides improved business continuity, scalablity, and agility; it also provides considerable power savings for large corporations.
In general, most traditional physical servers are 80 to 90% under-utilized. That is in large part due to the increased capacity we have seen through core architecture as illustrated in the diagram below.
Here are some numbers that demonstrate the tangible savings through physical server consolidation to a virtualized infrastructure.
Baseline
IBM xSeries 3650M2 and 3550M2 have a 360 average watt output
The national average is $.0685 a kilowatt hour (According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration)
Virtual Machine Savings
• If 1500 virtual machines were physical servers
• It would generate roughly 540,000 watts of power
That saves:
$36.99 an hour
$324,254.34 a year
Physical Server Retirement Savings
• Retiring 200 physical servers
• 72,000 watts of power was saved
That saves:
$4.93 an hour
$43,216.38 a year
Now those are savings any IT executive would be proud of!