If your company is looking for ways to squeeze more out of IT these days (and who isn't), server virtualization is one of the moves some organizations are making to find savings. Just ask Kent Kushar, CIO at wine maker E&J Gallo.Virtualization is an example of using technology itself to wring out savings in technology investments, says Kushar. Over the last 18 months, Gallo has cut its number of physical server boxes by 57%, which "in turn has made the payback just slightly longer than one year," he says.

"The ROI is terrific!" says an enthusiastic Kushar in an e-mail to InformationWeek. On top of that, he says, "we have the cost avoidance going forward equal to the cost of those eliminated hardware servers and their maintenance." Want to know more? "Server license costs are relatively flat -- we still have about the same number of logical servers," he says. "Another advantage we are seeing is the improved configuration time for new servers in the standardized environment. What used to take three to four days is now accomplished in one day." One related cost that hasn't been affected too much by the server consolidation and virtualization is power to cool the environment. "Cooling is approximately the same, but it has required us to reconfiguration and/or change the placement to handle the more densely populated physical server boxes," he says.

Has your organization looked into server consolidation and virtualization to save IT costs? How's that going for you?