"IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems, among others, are creating an imperative. Their infrastructure initiatives, entitled respectively; On Demand, Adaptive Enterprise and N1, are all quite similar and aimed at the idea of virtualising the hardware layer. The primary reason for wanting to virtualise hardware is this; in the last five years or so companies have been buying servers in an ad hoc manner, tending to deploy them on a one server per application basis.
"Consequently, they assembled server farms which turn out to have an average hardware utilization of about 20 percent. This is, of course, a waste of money and, in the long run, a management headache. However there are other imperatives, particularly the idea of being able to provide infrastructure as a service--dynamically, i.e. you pay for what you use and you get what you need when you need it..."
