"We're having to adapt the data center [which was built in the 1960s] to new demands that in the past just weren't there," Turner says.

Ultimately, the goal is to examine usage over time and power down unused nodes, while more intelligently managing live migration capabilities, he says.

IT Roadmap will also feature keynote speaker Madge Meyer, executive vice president of global infrastructure services at State Street, which is virtualizing on a completely different scale, having applied the technology to about half of the company's 10,000 servers worldwide.

Virtualization has improved State Street's development environment and made the provisioning of new servers simpler and faster, but Meyer says not every workload is appropriate for the technology.

"Applications that require a lot of processing power are not good candidates for virtualization," Meyer says.