Data centers "are becoming more and more swollen," IDC analyst Vernon Turner said Monday at the IDC Virtualization Forum in New York. Most of the servers purchased today cost less than US$3,000. And while that may sound inexpensive, the annual power and cooling bill for 100 servers is about $40,000. In total, for every $1 spent on a server, $7 is spent on support, he said.

The rapid growth of servers is not news to Mark Winter, executive vice president for IT at Deluxe Laboratories, a Los Angeles-based media services company that's a subsidiary of Rank Group PLC. Winter's IT staff is managing about 400 mostly x86-based servers, and the server count is growing about 30 percent a year.

"I'm getting to the point where I'm having difficulty managing it today," said Winter, who said his ratio of servers to systems administrators is about 30:1, which is higher than he likes. "Right now, I'm at half the numbers [of workers] I need for the servers I've got."

Winter was among the IT managers who turned out for the IDC Virtualization Forum, where vendors and analysts predict a relentless march to virtualization and added capabilities for enterprisewide virtualization and resource management. Also on hand were officials from Intel Corp. and Advance Micro Devices Inc., who made several announcements as part of their drive to bring virtualization to the chip level.

Intel has begun allowing users to enable its Virtualization Technology (VT), which has been shipping with some of its processors since last year, so they can begin testing it. The technology has been included in the company's Xeon MP chip, formerly code-named Paxville, since last year.