Why virtualise?

Cost saving example

An environment of a hundred servers:
Product Price each Price Total
100 x 2xQuad-Core - 2GB RAM - 70GB HD SERVER £2,250.00 £225,000.00
Total £225,000.00
...consolidated down to three servers with shared storage:
3 x 2xQuad-Core - 64GB RAM - 70GB HD SERVER £9,658.54 £28,975.62
1 x 25TB SAN Storage £80,000.00
6 x Fibre 4Gb Host Bus Adapter £495.00 £1,980.00
2 x Fibre Channel Switch £4,000.00 £8,000.00
3 x Vmware Enterprise Licensing 2xproc US$5720.00 £9,000.00
Total £127,955.62
A 43% SAVING on hardware alone! £97,044.38
Reduced power consumption:
Elecrtrical costs per month Yearly Electricity cost
100 servers @ 300W per server and approx 10p/kWh £216.00 £2,592.00
3 servers @ 545W per server and approx 10p/kWh £117.72
1 SAN + Fabric switches @ 1000W £72.00 £864.00
A 66% SAVING on electricity -£1,728.00