Compete today, thrive tomorrow with virtualization and consolidation tools.

Aaron Hay, senior research consultant at Info-Tech Consulting Group, explains, "Green IT is an umbrella of technologies and initiatives that provide some sort of business value-and usually provide cost savings associated with the reduction of some consumables. For example, server virtualization is the easiest example people are able to relate to. You're reducing the costs of servers that you have to buy in the future, but you're also reducing your energy footprint. The result is that you're reducing your environmental impact." Virtualization and consolidation initiatives are also instrumental to enabling a more dynamic infrastructure. These activities can help companies address operational cost and complexity-while also helping achieve breakthrough productivity gains. How? To start with, a virtualized IT environment offers a common management platform which reduces the complexity IT administration. Also, by eliminating hardware sprawl through the deployment of virtual servers, data availability, uptime and accessibility improve since virtualized environments typically have more load-balancing capabilities to handle traffic spikes. In this way virtualization helps reinvent infrastructure, making it leaner, flexible and smarter.