Virtualization is economical, feature rich, highly versatile, easily maintainable, and climate friendly. The IST Cloud service offers economy of scale, which can reduce the carbon footprint of a server by as much as 90% by running as many as 30 to 40 virtual machines per physical host through VMWare optimization and dynamic resource distribution. The IST Cloud is also built on an already energy efficient and scalable blade architecture.

Virtualization lowers the number of physical servers needed for university business, reducing procurement overhead, and reducing the amount of hazardous industrial waste from unnecessary equipment production and retired equipment recycling.

The IST cloud runs hundreds of virtual servers of all sizes and function including very high I/O enterprise database systems, and the carbon and cost savings increases with every campus server that is brought into the cloud. Centralization of physical resources will help improve the economy of scale, lowering the costs for the university, and allow departmental IT staff to concentrate on system and application management and development.