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In a fiercely competitive auto industry, Mazda North America depends on IT to inject the same “Zoom-Zoom” that characterizes their cars into its business operations. As Mazda’s IT initiatives such as increasing field managers’ effectiveness grew, so did its server count – from 150 to nearly 300. “With a one-application-per-server approach and pressure to heighten system availability, all we could see was server sprawl. Complexity rose to the point where our IT staff was spending most of its time just maintaining those servers,” says Jim DiMarzo, CIO of North America Operations. In addition, increasing energy costs were causing power and cooling expenses to overtake equipment costs. To help solve their problems, Mazda turned to virtualization technology.

Typical of any business in a booming environment, you expand operations, hire more people, open new offices (maybe even factories) in growth markets, and diversify product portfolio to capture a larger segment of the market. In the process, your IT infrastructure expands to cope with the expansion. All seems rosy at the time.

Often a server or workstation just has one operating system. For example, XP or Vista on workstations, and, Windows 2003 server. Virtualization enables support of multiple operating systems, as in Vista OR Windows 2000. It's also possible to have several copies of Windows 2003 running currently: one for SQL, one for files, and one for finance.