Port servers dish up energy savings

Sep 10 2009 by Andrew Mernin, The Journal

A PARTNERSHIP with an IT firm has seen the Port of Tyne reduce its energy bills by £20,000.

Newcastle-based SITS Group, won a contract to provide IT back-up and disaster recovery support to the port’s 600-acre site.

The firm spent four weeks studying data traffic and patterns of use and then introduced a system using the latest virtualisation technology to create a much leaner, more efficient structure, reducing the number of physical servers needed from 28 down to just three.

Virtualisation can cut energy use by combining all the available resources and constantly adjusting usage according to the demand at the time.

According to industry experts Gartner, the virtualisation market is set to grow by 300%, through organisations looking to cut costs while making better use of resources.

Phil Cambers, commercial director of SITS Group, said: “It’s a much more intelligent use of resources.

“For instance, if you have a server dedicated to one task, and that task is only carried out once a day or even once a week, you have a server costing you money by being under-utilised and putting increased pressure on other parts of the network.

“Having more servers than are truly needed also means a business is exposing itself to too many potential points of failure.”

The Port’s previous server generated 40 tonnes of CO2 a year but the new structure has reduced that to 15 tonnes – which should save the Port over £20,000 in annual energy costs.