Virtualisation delivers big $ savings for Corporate Express

Beverley Head
Thursday, 03 September 2009 09:10

IT Industry - Market

Virtualising both processors and power supplies has cut 140,000 tonnes of CO2 from Corporate Express’s carbon footprint, and sliced $23,000 a year off its electricity bills.

Mark Jones, technology infrastructure manager for the office products supplier, believes there are even more savings to be had from a planned move to real time power monitoring.

Since installing IBM blade servers and Eaton uninterruptible power supply (UPS) blades in its data centre the organisation has been conducting power audits once or twice a year, but now plans to monitor power consumption real time.

Jones said that the two big power consumers in the data centre are the UPS units and air-conditioning. Energy audits have shown the virtualised data centre saves 140,000 tonnes of CO2 and $23,000 a year. For Corporate Express, which voluntarily reports its carbon footprint as part of the Carbon Disclosure Project, having a good handle on its emissions is important.

But as Jones explained: “One of the things with an audit is it is just a snapshot in time - we had planned to do that biannually, but now we think there will be more benefit from a more real time PUE (power usage effectiveness) measurement.”

The PUE, a power usage metric developed by the industry consortium Green Grid, is defined as the total facility power (power going into the data centre) divided by the IT equipment power, so a PUE of 3 would mean it takes three times as much energy to power the data centre as to power the IT equipment where a PUE of 1 suggests complete efficiency where all the power to the data centre is being used to power IT (rather than power the lights, air conditioners or lost through power leakage).

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