Stratus' recent white paper on Best Practices for Server Virtualization in Mission-Critical Healthcare IT outlines how and why large hospitals and healthcare delivery organizations are beginning to explore server virtualization.

The most logical reasons to virtualize are cost reduction and less energy consumption. Virtualization clearly allows healthcare delivery organizations to save money by consolidating a number of applications on the same physical server, thus eliminating the need to have a single app running on an under-utilized server. This reduces server overcrowding problems, which can be quite significant in hospitals, and saves operational costs on cooling and power. In one case Covenant Health, a healthcare provider in Knoxville, Tennessee, reduced its operational costs by $75,000 within a year and achieved a 25:1 server consolidation ratio.

Why will healthcare delivery organizations virtualize? Is it just to save money, with an ancillary benefit of saving energy? Or will the environmental impact play a larger role in the decision making process?