Cut servers and reduce your footprint

Nov 26 2009 by Phil Cambers, The Journal

IT'S no exaggeration to say that virtualisation is set to become computing's de facto standard.

Industry experts at Gartner predict the market will grow by 300% in the next year, as more organisations take advantage of the cost, efficiency, business continuity and carbon benefits of using virtualisation technologies.

Maintaining a large, traditional server estate can consume many man-hours and incur direct and hidden costs. And of course the more servers a business has, the more potential points of failure it exposes itself to.

Many organisations have servers dedicated to individual tasks, and if that task is only carried out once a day or once a week, each of those under-utilised servers are costing money while increasing the pressure on other parts of the network.

Virtualisation works by housing several virtual servers within one physical machine. This allows the power of individual servers to be pooled and shared across multiple environments, with controls that constantly adjust the load between servers to make the most intelligent use of resources.

The key benefits of virtualisation are that it creates a highly resource-efficient infrastructure and a stronger and more resilient backup and disaster recovery platform. It also results in a reduction in admin and running costs, and carbon emissions.

The true cost of server ownership can be sobering. On average, a month-long capacity planning exercise to analyse data traffic, power usage, vulnerable points and overall cost of ownership on a non-virtualised site will highlight many servers working at just 10% of capacity.

There is no other area of business where an asset would be allowed to under-perform by such a huge margin.

Virtualisation can also boost a company’s green credentials. Running a large bank of servers creates enormous amounts of heat, which then requires energy to cool. A business with a 30-server estate can expect virtualisation to reduce that number to three, cutting its carbon output from approximately 40 tonnes to 15 – that’s the equivalent of taking seven cars off the road. The same carbon and costs savings apply when virtualising desktop PCs, in addition to the technical and admin advantages. Replacing 50 desktops with thin clients will result in cost savings of around £9,000 per year on electricity, and a carbon saving of 15 tonnes.

With the Government’s new Carbon Reduction Commitment regulations set to come into force next year, virtualisation is just one of the ways that businesses can reduce carbon output and its corresponding tax levels.

As organisations across the public and private sector look to lower operational costs and create a more agile IT infrastructure to support their business, the spotlight will be on virtualisation to deliver results.

Phil Cambers is commercial director, SITS Group