Server virtualization is one such technology that provides liquidity to IT by delivering improved hardware utilization, physical server consolidation, increased availability and lower data center operating costs. ESG believes that server virtualization is acting as a catalyst for virtualization at all layers within the data center, a concept ESG refers to as Infrastructure Virtualization. The server virtualization market is red hot and is only showing signs of increased adoption. Businesses are running production workloads on virtual machines and finding the benefits nothing short of phenomenal. ESG Research recently surveyed early server virtualization adopters and discovered that 46% of the current users we surveyed consider themselves to be running "Tier 1" applications on virtual machines and there are no signs of this slowing down.

Server virtualization solutions offer key functionality that requires underlying networked storage. As such, the data storage infrastructure is an important building block in deploying server virtualization solutions. Storing virtual machine images on networked storage enables the mobility of virtual machines between physical servers for load balancing, high availability and maximum resource utilization. Additionally, multiple copies of virtual machines are created for replication and DR purposes and used to easily perform "bare metal" recoveries.