Gregory Ness submits:
When VMware (VMW) entered the production data center, it was the beginning of a massive IT disruption with profound implications for careers, vendors and the next tech innovation cycle, driven by deep reductions in network operating expenses and equally uplifting increases in network flexibility and intelligence.
VMware set the stage for the multibillion dollar system virtualization category by allowing operating systems and applications to be easily set up and moved on top of commodity server hardware. They automated systems that had been requiring ever-increasing amounts of manual labor as data centers grew ever more complex by creating an abstracting layer between software and hardware.
Check out the
IDC slide referenced in the October, 2008
infrastructure 2.0 blog on “Virtualization, Cloud Computing and IT Diseconomies”. The market cap of VMware was to a great extent driven by the increasing proportions of management expense required for supporting ever more complex system infrastructures.
There is a similar (internal HP only, based on IDC data) slide showing the creeping opex menace growing every year to consume more than 50% of server costs. Also read
"Server Management Costs Soar, Says IDC":
For every server that is purchased and installed, management costs increase exponentially. Matt Eastwood, vice president, enterprise server research for Framingham, Mass.,-based IDC says that a penny saved in initial cost is a dollar spent on management. "IT pros are always interested in getting the best deal that they can when they purchase new equipment. But what they are beginning to realize is that the cost of maintaining a server is five to seven times the purchase price."
- Brian Kraemer, SearchDataCenter.com Feb 2006
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