Virtualization of Server Hardware for Savings of Energy and Data Center Floor Space

Data centers are the homes for the many, many servers that corporations need these days in order to conduct their business efficiently. The environmental and cost pressures faced by these data centers are rapidly increasing in the face of natural resource constraints as a result of not only the exhaustion of domestic land in appealing areas, but also of rapid growth in developing countries such as India and China. Hardware virtualization contributes some solutions to this problem by offering the opportunity to consolidate multiple under-utilized servers into a single physical server, thereby reducing the physical and environmental footprint of data centers by reducing the physical space required to house them, and the energy inputs needed to power them.