The newspaper has already started migrating some of its most-critical applications to a virtualized environment on dual-core Xeon servers where Shorter has been able to run seven to 12 virtual servers per processor. He believes he will be able to get 15 to 30 virtual severs per processor on quad-core systems.

"If you can get 10 virtual servers on one hardware node, that may cost you about $12,000, as compared to $50,000 for 10 hardware-based servers," he said.

Bandwidth, software and other issues

Simply migrating to multicore systems does not guarantee efficiency, however, cautions Gartner's Reynolds. IT managers must do some upfront planning to ensure that they have enough network bandwidth to keep the additional processor cores fed, and they must make sure their applications are optimized to take full advantage of multicore environments.

"IT managers don't get fired because the electricity bill is too high," Reynolds said. "They get fired because they can't deliver the computing requirements of the organization."