"Then, in November, one of our main breakers blew," Ooi says. "I had to run down to the office and spend several hours bringing every server back up. The problem with that is, if the breaker blows and you bring everything back up, you bring it back up to where it was when the breaker blew—if I was drawing 15.5 AMPs and I brought it back up, the breaker would blow again."

By virtualizing 10 physical servers, Ooi reduced his energy consumption by 25 percent.

As a result of the early virtualization project, Ooi has now consolidated 49 physical servers onto just five and has been able to avoid buying and supporting 39 new servers.

"Servers start at $2,000 to $8,000," Ooi says. "That's a lot of money. We've been able to put a lot of applications into play that we couldn't have done before—I would have had to tell my users to wait 6-8 months until I built a data center to make that happen. With virtualization, we had things in a couple of days."

© 2008 CXO Media Inc.