Storage Cat 08 3/10/08 17:12 Page 54
54 CUTTING POWER CONSUMPTION
ELECTRICITY COSTS CUT BY THOUSANDS
UK council simplifies management and saves up to £15,000 per
year in electricity costs with virtualized infrastructure
Words: By Iain Campbell, Director of UK Public Sector, Dell
With shrinking budgets and changing public introduce a virtual environment to reduce the
requirements, UK councils are under growing number of servers it was using. After a thorough
pressure to be responsive to customer demand evaluation and consultancy period, the council
with limited funding. Technology can be a means engaged Dell to provide and implement four new
of delivering greater business efficiency while Dell
™
PowerEdge
™
2950 servers along with a Dell |
achieving impressive returns on investment. As a EMC CX3-20c SAN storage array, Dell
result, councils country-wide are becoming PowerVault
™
ML6010 tape library and VMware
®
increasingly dependent on their IT infrastructure. Vi3 Enterprise Server.
Winchester City Council found that management By substituting physical servers with a virtual
of its fast-growing server infrastructure was time- server environment, Winchester City Council has
consuming and expensive. In addition, the distributed simplified IT maintenance while dramatically cutting
storage environment could not scale to accommodate power consumption. Sheila Davidge, head of
a new Electronic Document Records Management information management and technology,
System (EDRMS). Winchester City Council says: “We’ve reduced the
The council chose to consolidate its server number of physical servers we use from 45 to 12.
infrastructure by introducing a scalable virtual As a result, we estimate that we should be making
environment based on VMware
™
software, Dell
™
between £12,000 and £15,000 per year in
PowerEdge
™
2950 servers and a Dell | EMC CX3- electricity savings alone. “In addition, with the time
20C SAN storage array, Dell provided a savings we’ve made conducting day-to-day
comprehensive infrastructure consulting, maintenance and support, the new technology will
implementation and support package. have paid for itself in no time. As well as
With a distributed storage environment and a fast- improving efficiency across the council, this
growing server infrastructure, the team was spending lots whole project has ultimately been cost-neutral.”
of time manually managing and updating the technology with
patches – a time-consuming process. With 45 servers, New infrastructure helps deliver
some of which were nearly five years old, the organisation 100 percent uptime
decided to conduct a technology overhaul that would With the virtual environment in place, the council
simplify and accelerate day-to-day maintenance. can be confident that no data will be lost in the
Reducing power consumption was also a priority for event of technology failure. Davidge says: “We
the council. With green issues increasingly high on can take a copy of the data on our virtual
the government agenda, all UK councils are under machines and move it to a spare physical server.
pressure to lower their carbon footprints. One of We know that our business-critical data is
Winchester City Council’s key concerns was its high safe. Also, outsourced IT staff can now do
electricity usage. LAN-free backups, which means they can
With a long-standing relationship with Dell already in secure the data more quickly. Now, they
place, Winchester City Council asked for a Dell account can restore each virtual machine in one
manager to make an onsite visit to assess the council’s IT simple step, or restore individual files on
requirements. Dell then suggested that the council an as-needed basis.
15
15
15
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The most reliable, innovative name
72
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in storage networking
58
Visit Emulex at Stand 420
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