I know a bit late in the game, but we are looking at utilizing VPS (virtual private servers), as well as the new VPM (virtual private machines).
As a datacenter, this will allow us to effectively make a powerful single server into several virtual ones. The cost savings are long term for us because instead of several "actual" machines, we have several virtual machines and only one actual real machine. This will mean less electric used, and less heat output.
This is something I have been busy on for a couple of weeks now testing out numrous scenarios on the best way to do it. If you dont know what VPM is, consider it like this....
Akin a super powerful server to an Olympic sized pool. How many people can afford, or even effectively need such a large pool? Now imagine dividing that pool up in the same hole into multiple pools of affordable and usable sizes, each independent of each other, but getting water, filtering, and power from the same supply. This is what we would do to a server that has 5+ huge SCSI drives, RAID5, 4 Xeon processors with each being a quad core (total 16 virtual processors), and 32+ gigs ram all divided up equally into independent virtual machines.
