Virtualization: The Best
Initiative to Alleviate the Power
Crisis in the Data Center
John Gilmartin, VMware
Jake Seitz, First American

Agenda
The Data Center Climate Crisis
The Economic and Environmental Impact of
Server Consolidation
Ongoing Optimization of Power Consumption
2

Today’s Model is Broken
(Over)sizing of capacity upfront
Applications sentenced to
servers for life, low flexibility
Servers spend life bored,
underutilized
Yet servers consume >50% of
average power when idle
Servers are getting smaller but
consume more power
Datacenters are outdated and
hugely inefficient
3

Datacenter Energy Use Will Continue to Rise
Source: EPA report to Congress on Data Center Energy Efficiency, July 2007
4