Thompson also appreciates the virtualized environment's inherent redundancy. "If we do have a critical, fatal error happening here at the primary data center, we can have access to just about all our network data within a matter of hours," he says.

Like Thompson, O'Malley says that virtualization can give a big boost to businesses striving for better storage efficiency. Tasty Baking now uses a FAS3020 system from NetApp Inc. () to provide Fibre Channel-based storage resources to 40 virtual servers running on 10 physical servers. "We moved away from having any local storage on servers or having any sort of direct-attached storage or anything of that kind," O'Malley says. "Now everything runs off NetApp."

Before O'Malley and his team moved to the virtualized environment, adding storage was both a challenge and a puzzle. "If we were out of storage on a particular server, we wondered if we should find more slots where we could put more disks in, or maybe attach some storage directly to that box," he recalls. "You might have storage space on another server, but you couldn't really share it over to that machine."

The new environment allows O'Malley to consolidate and optimize storage resources. "We've got one place where everybody is going for storage," he says. "With the thin provisioning, and the ability to move storage, we have one bucket that we're pulling from, and we can get by with a lot less overhead."

The virtualized arrangement allows for more planning flexibility. "We don't have to determine what the maximum possible storage might be for an application over the next three years," O'Malley says. "We don't have to ask that question before we start and advise the server to hold that."