Early customers

The Charlotte Observer, North Carolina's largest daily newspaper, in December began migrating some of the publication's most important applications to a virtualized environment.

The paper is moving its Oracle-based circulation system database to servers that have Intel's new quad-core Xeon processors with baked-in, hardware-enabled virtualization technology. Also being placed on these same virtualized servers is the paper's editorial content workflow system.

Geoff Shorter, IT infrastructure manager at The Observer, says he found out during his testing phase how these new servers can run virtualization in near-native speeds. The database used for the test prepares subscription renewal notices and determines which accounts need to billed, how much to bill and for what period of time.

Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer for virtualization software provider Virtual Iron, says virtualization often results in overall hardware performance penalties, ranging from 10 percent to 50 percent. But when using chip-enabled virtualization, that penalty can drop to 4 percent or less.