Virtualization: A Boon for Green Computing
At the end of the 1970s, the world saw a computer revolution, and waves of new business development followed. By the early 1990s, there were signs of a green computing revolution, and now businesses are taking advantage of the industry’s need for environmentally-friendly products. Data centers, in particular, have become a target market, since the past few years have seen a sharp increase in their rate of energy consumption.
One of the more successful technologies to have been developed is virtualization. Broadly speaking, to virtualize is to make a single piece of hardware function as multiple pieces. Different user interfaces isolate portions of the hardware, and make each one operate as a separate entity. As applied to data centers, installing virtual infrastructure allows more operating systems and applications to run on fewer servers, which reduces overall energy use and cooling requirements. Running fewer servers also means that data centers could reduce their building size as well.
