I've spoken with dozens of SME end users about power, cooling and floor space issues and it is a real problem. The cost of power varies significantly within the United States and is highest for regions along the densely populated East and West coasts, Alaska and Hawaii. Other parts of the world, including Europe and Asia, are experiencing even greater challenges with the high cost of energy, limited availability of power and floor space. I have spoken with IT managers that just don't have any more power. They literally have to turn something off in order to power something else on.

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HVAC systems draw even more electricity as they work harder to remove increased amounts of excess heat. If the power and cooling systems in the data center are near capacity, expensive upgrades may become unavoidable. This problem eclipses the cost of power - upgrading your HVAC system is disruptive and extremely expensive.

Server virtualization can be an effective remedy for power, cooling and floor space challenges. One of the core values of server virtualization is to reduce the number of physical servers in the data center. The math is easy - less physical infrastructure creates a domino effect of efficiency.

Virtual Iron's architecture provides even greater power and cooling efficiency since we don't need a local disk drive in the server. Instead Virtual Iron uses the physical server's memory. Disk drives are mechincal devices that spin and spin and spin. As such they consume lots of power and generate lots of heat. Therefore, Virtual Iron has an inherent advantage over VMware - since they do require local disk drives.

Power and cooling is not the only issue where disk drives are concerned. The cost of the disk drives must be factored in as well. The price of disk drives are getting pretty low on a per GB basis but the drives keep getting bigger - which means you pay more even if you don't need all that capacity. Additionally, managing local server disk drives add layers of inefficiency that flies in the face of a virtualized data center. Keep in mind that disk drives do three things - read, write and break.

When we bring up the disk drive issue to customers they get a moment of clarity and they agree that not having local drives is a real advantage. But it is something that is easy to overlook. Is it a make or break consideration? It depends. If you have a couple of physical servers - probably not, but it all adds up. If you have five, six, ten, twenty, one hundred physical servers - it is a pretty major issue - no matter how you spin it.