For many applications, an entry-level workstation will provide mind-blowing performance in comparison with a desktop PC. Still, not everyone needs a workstation. A typical office worker running standard office applications will get all the performance they need from a standard business PC. Anyone running more demanding applications, however, can expect to be more productive, creative and satisfied using a workstation. Designers, engineers, financial analysts, researchers, and even office “power users” will most likely find that the benefits of an entry-level workstation far exceed the small additional cost.

How quickly can you change complex data into actionable information? Workstations based on the new Intel® Microarchitecture, codenamed Nehalem, are designed or intelligent performance, new levels of energy efficiency, and flexible expandability giving workstation users unprecedented time-to-results in quieter, cooler and potentially smaller form-factors. Result: Users can iterate and innovate faster and compress the time between the idea and a product.

Intel and CXO Media have teamed up to recognize and reward organizations that have led the way with best practices for data center management and client fleet management. The Intel Premier IT Knowledge Awards Program will spotlight organizations that leverage innovation and solid best practices to make a substantive impact on their business. We invite you to participate by sending us your story.

Application performance is critical for day-to-day business operations, as well as creating new products and services, increasing competitiveness, and reaching new customers. For the past decade, IT has rapidly added low-cost hardware to accommodate business growth, and many data centers are now stretched to capacity in terms of power, cooling, and floor space. By refreshing data center infrastructure with higher performance, more adaptive, and power-conscious servers, you can deliver additional capability and scalability within the same energy and space footprint, staying ahead of increasing business demands.

Description: Energy demands in the data center are compromising business agility. In a recent survey, 42 percent of data center owners said they would exceed power capacity within the next 12-24 months, and 39 percent said they would exceed cooling capacity in the same timeframe.1 And IDC estimates that for every dollar IT spends on hardware to support new users and applications, they spend another 50 cents on power and cooling for existing hardware.2 As data centers reach the upper limits of their power and cooling capacity, efficiency has become the focus for data center design and extending the life of existing data centers.

Server virtualization is helping IT organizations improve data center productivity in fundamental ways. It lets you consolidate multiple operating systems and applications per physical server, reducing the size and costs of your IT infrastructure, while enabling you to deploy new applications in minutes. Virtualization also lets you move running applications from one server to another without downtime, for flexible workload management, high availability during planned maintenance or unplanned events. Investment in virtualization solutions is an intelligent business decision: the benefits in utilization, energy savings, manageability, service levels and cost models can be dramatic.