There is a great article over on the Government Technology Magazine site discussing the virtues of virtualization. It includes some great examples of how governments are using this technology to reduce the footprint of their data centers, use less energy and simplify the maintenance of aging, unwieldy fleets of servers.
Sadly, it looks like governments have not led the charge on this:
“Although virtualization has entered the mainstream, the transition process is still in the beginning stage. About 75 percent of large organizations have started down the path to some degree, Goldworm said, but only about 5 percent of those organizations’ servers have been virtualized. She estimated that only 20 percent to 40 percent of government organizations have begun the process.”
What is especially interesting is that the trend towards the use of virtualization seems to favor smaller governments like counties and cities, that typically lag behind the federal and state governments in implementing new technologies:
“…smaller groups like city governments, because they tend to be in a homogeneous environment that is not as complex, are able to achieve results more quickly than larger organizations.”
It would be interesting to find out home many government agencies in my state have looked at virtualization, and how many have started down this road. I may have to look into how to conduct a survey on this issue.