Any worthwhile product brochure will list the benefits of the product being described. In the back of many buyers' minds, however, is the nagging question, "What aren't they telling me? What unexpected surprises await once I get the product into my environment?" And while it's true that new technologies can sometimes present troubling issues not addressed in the sales collateral, occasionally an organization gets that most wonderful of surprises: the unexpected benefit.

Virtualization is one such young technology that is building a track record for delivering benefits beyond those promised. For example, the basic premise of virtualization—being able to deploy as many as 20 or more virtual servers on a single physical server—instantly suggests the clear advantages you've undoubtedly already read about. And make no mistake, virtualization does deliver what it promises. But as Larry Liss, chief technology officer at Blank Rome LLP, learned to his delight, that was just the beginning.

Consolidation at the core

"Going back several years," he says, "we were starting to look at ways of consolidating servers because we were quickly running out of physical space in our data center. That was our chief concern, along with the obvious energy costs that were required to run all this equipment."

To get an idea of what comprises "all this equipment," consider the scope of Blank Rome's business. With a staff of more than 1,200 personnel in eight U.S. locations, as well as an office in Hong Kong, Blank Rome is an American Lawyer "Am Law 100" law firm that is still growing rapidly even after 60 years. The company's main data center in Philadelphia once had more than 150 physical servers in operation, with about 25 more located in other offices.

Today, thanks to a well-planned virtualization initiative currently in its final stages, Blank Rome is looking at consolidating 150 physical servers down to 20. The end result is a sharp reduction in equipment and energy costs.

Realizing the benefits beyond

Those were the expected benefits. What excited Liss most were the unexpected benefits.

"Once we started getting the virtual servers running, we quickly began to realize additional benefits beyond the space and energy savings," he says. "High availability and the ability to provision new applications faster are two key things that came out of this initiative that we didn't focus on originally. But they've made an enormous difference to our operations."

Before, with a data center overloaded with physical servers, Blank Rome experienced occasional outages caused by hardware failure. With a virtual environment, however, if there is trouble on one server, traffic automatically shifts to another server. "This capability alone has paid off for us a number of times already," says Liss.

Additionally, fast provisioning means Liss's group can bring a new application online quickly, without having to buy and install a new server. In fact, it can be done in a matter of hours or days rather than weeks. "This benefit became very clear to me when we needed to provision an entire set of applications and servers for a new Hong Kong office," Liss reports. "We were able to set it up locally on a single rack, test it, and then ship it to Hong Kong—confident that it was going to work. Now we're doing the same thing in New York and D.C., where we have smaller data centers and will have smaller storage area networks in each location."

Driving growth

Folks in the Philadelphia data center can monitor the Hong Kong servers from their homes or offices and handle any issues that come up remotely. And because provisioning is so much faster, planning windows can be shorter to accommodate rapid growth.

"The ability to absorb growth is essential to our organization," says Liss. "I don't want to go to the boss and say we can't accommodate some new undertaking. We want to be in a position to not only handle the firm's growth, but also to help drive it. With virtualization, we can do that."

So while saving space and costs are important advantages of virtualization, it's the unexpected benefits that may end up being more valuable to the business. Soon, information technology executives will not only come to expect the unexpected benefits, but demand them as well.