Fellow blogger Steve Duplessie at Steve’s IT Rants has picked up on the fact that Diane Green has left VMWare after a bad set of financial results. Steve writes a good article and it’s worth a read.

Diane is a victim of heroism via unexpected consequences. Pretty much single handed VMWare has raised the CPE - Compute Power Efficiency of the average Intel based server out of all recognition. Whenever I have had the guys pull together a report on Intel (Windows / Linux) CPU utilization, it averages 2%, it’s almost a law of the Universe!

VMWare delivered simple to implement and credible, Intel Virtualization, this plus the ever increasing costs of hosting a server has driven massive adoption of the technology. Virtualized boxes run at 20% utilization driven by a 10 - 1 consolidation ration (some do better, some do worse). So Diane has managed to reduce server population by 90% driving electricity and cooling demand way down.

Diane deserves to be honored as a true environmental hero because of her direct impact on global carbon emissions.