Price performance has increased dramatically in both the Intel and UNIX server marketplace over recent years.

Many organisations find themselves in a situation where server utilisation is low. This is a particularly pronounced problem in the Intel server environment where utilisation rates are often as low as 5%. The UNIX environment is better but utilisation is still often as low as 20%. Capital cost reduction may initially have masked the spiralling cost of incremental software licences, ongoing maintenance, utilities or facilities costs plus the increased management overhead of a proliferation of servers.