VERNON HILLS, IL — Virtualization may have been one of the hottest technological innovations of the last decade, but a combination of concerns are keeping it from planting deep roots in the corporate world.

A report released this month by CDW surveyed the virtualization landscape, finding that, although 90 percent of businesses say they've adopted virtualization, but only in small numbers of servers: Even companies that reported they'd "fully deployed" their virtualization plans had done so on 37 percent of their server infrastructure.

The drivers of the move to virtualization are less about green IT practices as about getting a handle on sprawling IT hardware: 71 percent ranked server consolidation as the top motivation, 68 percent put infrastructure management as the top reason, and just 57 percent put green IT initiatives as the prime reason for virtualization adoption.

That's not to say that virtualization is not achieving green IT goals; 95 percent of respondents in the CDW survey said that their companies are saving "significant money" from virtualizing their servers, and almost the same number measured their succes through increased productivity, a more agile business, and/or cutting energy costs. (Learn more about virtualization in GreenerComputing.com's virtualization resources section.)

By virtualizing data center operations, companies are able to save money on IT hardware, cut energy costs significantly by making servers perform much closer to their maximum capacity, and reduce end-of-life management costs associated with disposing of unwanted assets responsibly.

The full report, "CDW Server Virtualization Life Cycle Report:
Medium and Large Businesses," is available for download from CDW.com.