When most people think about the downside of virtualization, the standard knee-jerk reaction is to start talking about speed and latency. But there's a better documented concern out there: Sprawl. You may have noticed that the huge rise in virtual machine (VM) capacity in the financial services industry has led to the proliferation of virtual machines without adequate control. At some point, the buildup of these underutilized machines can really cut into the ROI.

A recent customer study by Embotics found that even in reasonably well controlled environments, at least 30 percent of the VMs were redundant. In some cases, the figure was as high as 50 percent, at a cost of between $1,000 and $3,000 per machine depending on its configuration. (More on the findings here). 

Financial service IT executives seem to be more aware of theses costs than their colleagues in other industries. Some will not scale their virtual environments until they have an effective VM lifecycle control and management system in place first, notes David Lynch, Vice President of Marketing for Embotics. This presents an opportunity for the likes of Embotics as well as Fortisphere, ManageIQ and most recently, DynamicOps. 

"In the current economic situation where there is increased pressure to accelerate the use of virtualization in order to get the bottom line savings, most need to scale now. Rather that waiting until they get into a sprawl situation, they are implementing sprawl-prevention systems like ours before they scale up their environments," Lynch notes.  

Certainly virtualization will be a key component of the drive to control IT costs at a lot of firms. - Jim