To date, the primary driver behind the adoption of server virtualization has been consolidation. But as enterprises gain experience with the technology, additional uses and benefits are surfacing. According to a recent Forrester study, 49% of enterprises surveyed that are implementing or interested in x86 server virtualization indicate that improving disaster recovery/business continuity continues to be a very important motivation for adoption. Server virtualization facilitates a rapid — or even automatic — restart of applications after an IT failure, and when used in conjunction with data replication between data centers, it can restart applications at a recovery site following a primary site failure. In particular, x86 server virtualization can improve the availability of business-critical systems that are important to the business but not critical enough to warrant the investment in expensive and complex resiliency technologies like fault-tolerant hardware or clustering.