Is there an immediate return on investment in virtualization? – Enterprise Management Quarterly

As a solution architect, I find out that lots of IT managers hold a misleading idea that the implementation of a virtual system reduces the operation costs immediately. Equipped with this idea, they rush to their bosses and convince them to approve the project while emphasing the immediate ROI (Return on Investment) to the organization.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Boasts Big Virtualization Improvements – eWeek

AMD and Intel both make hardware that is specially designed to assist virtualization technologies, including those found in Hyper-V. The latest example of this is the Intel Xeon 5500, or “Nahelem,” processors. I’ll be looking at how current-generation AMD and Intel server systems help boost the performance and capacity of virtualization tools as I work through a series of hardware reviews in the coming months. I’m not allowed to talk about some of the other improvements made in Hyper-V just yet, but expect to see extensive testing of these features soon.

Supply chain: Lean, green supply chain calculator – Modern Materials Handling

HK Systems, in conjunction with business partners and clients, has developed a simple yet innovative tool to calculate the expected energy requirements of a materials handling system design. “Lean, Green Supply Chains an Energy Consumption Calculator for Material Handling Systems” is an Excel-based calculator that allows the user to select among a wide variety of equipment, environment and building elements to approximate the expected annual utilization in kWh as well as dollars. The tool also facilitates the comparison of two different designs so the user can contrast the annual costs and uncover projected inefficiencies.

Virtualization Scalability: Bumping Into a Cloud Ceiling – IT World

Xignite was bumping into capacity limits as new customers continued to flock to the cloud. Perez told Xignite that it needed to get some headroom-and Xignite did exactly that by becoming a customer of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) Web services.

HP Set To Launch Storage Virtualization Bundle – CRN

Gottsegen also offered an energy-savings comparison for replacing older-generation G4 and G5 ProLiant servers with new G6 products. For example, he said the payback for replacing a solution consisting of 21 single-core G4 servers from 2005 with two quad-core G6 servers would be three months. If you’re replacing a solution of eight dual-core G5 servers from 2007, payback is achieved in 12 months.