University virtualises to save £120k

Lancaster University has saved over £100,000 on electricity bills and more than £20,000 on hardware procurement in less than three years after virtualising large chunks of its x86 server estate.

The organisation, which is based in north-west England and educates about 11,000 students, began a four-month pilot of EMC's VMWare technology in March 2006. Its datacentre was starting to hit capacity in terms of the amount of power being consumed to run and cool its IT infrastructure and it was running out of space.

Matthew Storey, systems technical co-ordinator for information systems services at the University, says: "We started examining virtualisation to reduce the impact of the physical issues we were facing, but we also explored other benefits that came along with that. Although the real focus was on cost savings, there's also an active desire in the university to be more 'green'. And from a management perspective, it's far easier to manage a large number of virtualised servers than lots of machines with different operating systems."

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-ken