From the company management blog, The Console, Bogomil Balkansky, Director of Product Marketing at VMware, talks about a rarely discussed benefit of virtualization, power saving, and provides some interesting numbers:
We estimate conservatively that for every workload moved from a physical to virtual environment, customers can save about $290 in electricity costs, and about $360 a year in cooling costs. The more important thing is that these savings accrue year after year.
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Beside the company bottom line effect, there is something to be said about the environmental impact of virtualization. The $650 per virtualized workload represents 8,000 kWh of electricity saved. With more than 1 million workloads running in VMware virtual machines, the aggregate power savings are about 8 billion kWh, which is more than the heating, ventilation, and cooling electricity consumed in New England in a year…
Read the whole article at source.