Tesco virtualises 1,500 servers to save costs and carbon

Tesco will significantly boost efficiency and reduce carbon emissions when it completes a project to virtualise 1,500 of its UK Windows-based servers.

The supermarket giant has been working with Citrix to move its operations onto a virtualised environment since October last year and has virtualised more than 700 physical servers so far.

The project is due for completion in early April and should see the retail giant cut the number of physical servers by a factor of 10, resulting in a cut of 20 per cent in datacentre carbon emissions.

The virtualisation work will also lead to CPU utilisation of around 70 per cent compared to six per cent previously.

Tesco's IT director for UK infrastructure and operations, Nick Folkes, told silicon.com: "We had done what many organisations have done historically and had not really thought about the efficiencies of the datacentre both in terms of the mechanical and electrical side but also the IT equipment that goes in there. That kind of boiled down to: we need to virtualise."

One of the most important technologies to be virtualised is the mission-critical real-time sales system which handles transactions on shop tills as well as the supplier order system.

The move onto a virtualised environment has meant that the real-time sales system has 75 per cent more capacity and can handle up to 1,500 sales-related messages per second, with room for future growth.

Folkes added: "The thing that weighs on a retailer's mind is probably cost - so efficiency is what generally drives us in assessing technology trends."

Tesco is continuing to virtualise the rest of its datacentre using the Citrix XenServer application and HP blade servers.

"We were all pleasantly surprised how easy it was to do - we were expecting more engineering challenges than we came across actually."

However, the IT director did encounter some companies who were reluctant to support their products in a virtualised environment.

"Microsoft were no different with respect to things like BizTalk [a server used to connect business systems]... I think we took a pretty single-minded approach from a strategy perspective to virtualise everything so therefore there could be no exceptions to the rule," Folkes concluded.