Virtualization technologies help companies use more of the computing resources they already have to save money. With a recession looming, virtualization technologies are becoming must-have budget items as companies need to find ways to cut costs. "In a recession, virtualization is going to get hotter," says Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman.

Virtualization Market Size

Right now, most companies are using virtualization software to harness the data-processing power of their computer servers, allowing them to run several operating systems and applications. Typically, servers only run one system or application, so virtualization lets a single server function as many.

A Forrester Research (nasdaq: FORR - news - people ) report last fall found that half the businesses surveyed said they are currently "virtualizing" their computer servers; two-thirds said they will start using server-virtualization technologies by the end of 2007.

Quantifying exactly how much money companies save with virtualization is tricky, Bittman says, but there's no doubt the dollar amount is significant. "If I can go from 12 systems to one system, there seems to be an obvious savings there," he says.

The virtualization market is expected to double to $12 billion by 2011 from $5.5 billion in 2009.

EFN Enterprises offers three types of Virtualization:

• Harware Virtualization
• Full Virtualization
• Software Virtualization

Harware Virtualization

• Reducing costs dramatically
• Leverage Existing Assets
• Improve Flexibility of IT Infrastructure
• Increase Availability at Lower Cost
• Enhance Manageability and Automation
• Resource virtualization
• Aka partitions, domains
• CPU, memory, I/O, and guest O/S run in isolation on physical server
• Near native performance

Software Virtualization

• Virtualizes access to hardware via ‘hypervisor’
• VM OS’s require porting to recognize ‘hypercalls’
• Very fast performance

Full-Virtualization

• Virtualizes access to hardware via ‘hypervisor’
• VMWare and Zen for our Zeon Base Servers
• ‘Bare metal’ installation emulates hardware w/o hypervisor
• No porting required
• Some performance degradation
• Operating System Virtualization

EFN Enterprises Virtualization Strategy is to utilize ‘Best-in-class’ virtualization tools for:

• Resource virtualization
• Multiple OS support
• Simplified management
• Provide comprehensive data lifecycle management
• Continue leadership and influence within Open Source community to drive open standards
• Continue technical innovation that maximizes value to SGI customers without forcing lock-in
• Low TCO
• High performance / $$
• Unmatched scalability
• Petascale data management
• Customer-centric Service & Support

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