Server Virtualisation – Some Real Cost Savings

Shutting down 150 servers saves 40kVA

Another local government organisation that worked with Intercept on a server virtualisation project was Bracknell Forest Borough Council, which shared certain similarities with its Berkshire cousin in Windsor.

“We got involved in server virtualisation through the government’s green drivers,” Bracknell Forest Borough Council server manager, Iain Berry told eWEEK Europe. “We couldn’t have justified the business case on the initial hardware savings alone.”

Berry said that Bracknell council’s data centre was previously consuming half the energy used by its head office. But since making 150 servers redundant through virtualisation, and installing power management features in its data centre, it has also achieved a 40kVA drop in consumption.

The server consolidation exercise was also important to Bracknell as space was also a key challenge. “Although the current data centre was established before my time and wasn’t that old, it was already reaching capacity and space was a big issue,” he said. In addition, the initial evaluation work carried out by Intercept revealed that, out of 100 servers assessed, less than 10 were running at a less than 10-per-cent utilisation rate.

People were also key to pushing through the project successfully. “It’s important to identify the people in your teams who are interested in virtualisation. And we brought in ITIL [IT service management best practice] because we realised that, if we wanted to sweat the original physical server, there would be a cost associated with virtualising it as well.”

The project led the council’s IT department to also look at its storage area network (SAN) and storage virtualisation too because, as Berry put it, “every time you chomp a bit out of the SAN it affects your power metrics too”. As a result, he said that it was now looking at SAN replication to further support its newly virtualised IT infrastructure. “And we going to have cold-air containment systems fitted in the next weeks,” he added.

Both Clark and Berry also said their experiences with virtualisation had led them to explore the benefits of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) first. For Bracknell, the timing is paramount, as it is about to move to new offices and implement a new hot-desk policy. “The virtual environment gives us the obvious agility needed to support VDI,” said Berry. “IT makes sense to bring as much back into the data centre as possible, especially with security in mind.”