SWsoft, a service automation and virtualization provider today announced that service providers and IT organizations worldwide are increasingly using its Virtuozzo virtualization software to reduce expensive electric costs thereby saving energy consumption as well.

Several SWsoft customers are realizing the green potential of virtualization with Virtuozzo in significant ways. Ikoula from France estimates they can save as much as 60 percent on electricity by moving customers from dedicated to virtualized servers, while ServInt Internet Services estimates that their green efforts have produced a savings of as much as 85 percent in electricity usage for every hosted customer that transitions from a single physical server to a virtual server. Even German based Host Europe say that their virtualized hosting customers will use 63 percent less electric power.

Hosting companies consume a large amount of computing resources, running data centers with thousands of servers to provide companies with web sites, hosted applications and software-as-a-service (SaaS). A 50,000-square-foot data center uses approximately 4 megawatts of power, the equivalent of 57 barrels of oil a day. According to Gartner Research, energy costs could soon account for more than 50 percent of the total information technology budget for a typical data center.

"Virtuozzo delivers the highest density available in a virtualization solution, enabling hundreds of virtual environments on a single physical server, and so it offers the greatest potential for energy savings," said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of SWsoft. "By using Virtuozzo to achieve their green computing goals, hosting providers can significantly reduce their energy usage while also realizing greater efficiency in their datacenter."