The company expects to save about US$350 million in operating expenses.

Waxman said customers look increasingly at virtualization technology to allow virtual machines to move from one part of the data center to another.

This introduces the "dynamic data center" concept whereby workloads can be 'moved' to different parts of the data center to make the best use of resources. Waxman also cited Victoria's Melton Shire Council move from 12 to four servers through virtualization.

The council's SQL Server applications running on Xeon can now be deployed in "minutes versus weeks".

Regarding power consumption, Waxman said Intel's server processors have gone from consuming 135W of power to 40W, and with 1000 servers this could translate to as much $250,000 a year in power savings.