er before they changed over to virtualization technology. There are now four physical servers running VMware virtualization software. Each server boasts much more processing power and RAM than the servers that were replaced. Moreover, they're used more efficiently and require less staff time to maintain. Additionally, eight applications exist on individual servers because they weren't designed to work on virtual computers. This includes an e-mail server because it is a traffic-intensive application supporting a large volume of e-mail traffic daily. It also includes the Cisco Systems Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone system that still requires separate servers for the phone system and voicemail because the available software release was not compatible with VMware at the time of the initial purchase. In an interview, Seldow stated the following: Virtualization has many advantages for the school department. There are no longer 40 power plugs, 40 devices, as many moving parts, and 40 power supplies that can all fail and must all be maintained. The four servers with VMware act like one physical computer in which memory and processing power can be allocated to different virtual machines in real time. The network manager uses the management software's interface located in the main server to click and slide icons to the left or the right to allocate memory and processing power to applications, on the fly. Seldow also stated that the lease of patching and upgrading applications has added efficiency to data center operations. The management interface can be used to point and click to clone (make a copy) an application in need of an upgrade. The cloned application can then be tested before being released to the user community. Once it has been tested, two options exist to change the cur- rent setup: One is to upgrade the older version's virtual machine and delete the snapshot, or new version, of the application; the other option is to release the snapshot to end users and delete the old version. Continued Comput