In the traditional IT approach, every new software application required a new server. This added costs to every project and deployment took days to weeks. This also drove server sprawl. Application workloads were directly dependent on server reliability for uptime. Even planned hardware maintenance and software updates negatively impacted productivity. IT managers were challenged to meet increasing organizational demands on limited budget and time, while more and more resources were needed just to power, cool and maintain existing servers. And the number of servers continued to grow. The growing number of servers needed more time, money & people, but budgets weren't growing.

Challenges of the Traditional IT Approach:

• underutilized hardware, leading to sprawl
• slow IT response to organizational needs
• regular application and IT service level disruptions
• increased administrative staff, power and cooling needs

Watch this demo for an animated explanation of how virtualization addresses common data center challenges.