What does virtualization mean to a company, and what are the benefits of being "virtualized?"  Are there products for virtualization that a company can just add to an existing infrastructure? How do blade systems complement a virtual datacenter?

Companies today are moving so fast that their business and IT infrastructure need to be aligned in order to capitalize on the daily changes that take place in their environment.  Achieving this synchronization is a multi-faceted challenge, but one critical step is to move IT resources from silos focused on a particular application or business process to pools of shared infrastructure so that IT supply can quickly meet changing business demands. 

Virtualization enables this resource pooling and sharing, reducing a company's need to overprovision its IT resources and so enabling enterprises to use their IT assets more efficiently and reduce overall costs. 

In 2003, Gartner stated that by 2008, enterprises that do not leverage virtualization technologies will spend 25% more annually for hardware, labor, and space for Intel servers and 15% more for RISC servers (0.7 probability) . Virtualization allows a company to keep its IT costs in check while intelligently managing its enterprise.

A number of vendors, including HP, offer a broad portfolio of virtualization options to address customer needs and help businesses optimize specific elements of their IT infrastructure (including servers, storage, networking or printing).  Furthermore, these companies provide integrated virtualization solutions that go beyond basic pooling and share to optimize environments automatically to meet service level agreements, as well as assistance with the design, implementation and management of a complete, virtual IT utility infrastructure.

Virtualization is no longer simply a cost-saving technology. Companies today are discovering that virtualization really extends to both employees and business processes. With a virtualized infrastructure, people, processes and technology are focused on meeting service levels, capacity is allocated dynamically, resources are optimized, and the entire infrastructure is simplified and flexible.  

A blade systems infrastructure is a good example of a virtualized environment.  In this environment, virtual pools of server, storage and networking resources can be managed from a single console to configure and dynamically allocate horizontal, scale-out resources.  A blade should be an integrated infrastructure that delivers IT services from desktop to data center, not just a server.