With escalating electric power costs and increasing pressure to reduce energy consumption, a growing number of service providers and IT organizations worldwide are using Virtuozzo virtualization software from SWsoft to reduce their use of electricity and "go green." "Virtuozzo delivers the highest density available in a virtualization solution, enabling hundreds of virtual environments on a single physical server, and so it offers the greatest potential for energy savings," said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of SWsoft. "By using Virtuozzo to achieve their green computing goals, hosting providers can significantly reduce their energy usage while also realizing greater efficiency in their data center."
Several SWsoft customers are realizing the green potential of virtualization with Virtuozzo in significant ways, including a US-based hosting company that estimates that their green efforts have produced a savings of as much as 85 per cent in electricity usage for every hosted customer that transitions from a single physical server to a virtual server. In France, a hosting company has estimated it can save as much as 60 per cent on electricity by moving customers from dedicated to virtualized servers. The reduced power consumption also means delaying additional infrastructure investment to provide more power or space.
Hosting companies consume a large amount of computing resources, running data centers with thousands of servers to provide companies with web sites, hosted applications and software-as-a-service (SaaS). A 50,000-square-foot data center uses approximately 4MW of power, the equivalent of 57 barrels of oil a day. According to Gartner Research, energy costs could soon account for more than 50 per cent of the total information technology budget for a typical data center. SWsoft Virtuozzo operating system virtualization software uses patented technology to create multiple, isolated virtual environments, or virtual private servers, on a single physical server and operating system, making the most efficient use of hardware, software and other resources. Each virtual environment has the same performance and functionality as a stand-alone server.