Virtualization is one of the hottest trends in IT today, and VMware, with its industry-leading server virtualization solutions, has been one of the major beneficiaries. Total cost considerations are an important part of the reason many organizations turn to VMware. A virtualized server infrastructure maximizes server utilization, performance and data resiliency, all of which reduce total cost. IT executives point to a number of benefits from deploying VMware, including lower costs of server hardware, improved power and cooling efficiency, lower costs of maintenance and system management, and reduced downtime.

Many companies are also using server virtualization as an opportunity to consolidate their storage and migrate to networked storage architectures. As enterprises start understanding the cost savings VMware provides, they are able to combine the additional benefits of flexibility, scalability, and reliability of a network storage environment. Additionally, almost all of the companies interviewed as part of this study choose to use VMware's VMotion feature as part of their VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) license and therefore require network storage for their VMware environment.