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Virtualisation helps teachers slash electricity bill
Case study: Teachers' association brings virtualisation into play

By Gemma Simpson

Published: Monday 26 March 2007

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) has reduced the number of servers it needs - and slashed the electricity bill for its server room by three-quarters by using virtualisation software.

The ATL has so far reduced the number of servers in its data centre by half.

Bernard King, systems architect at the ATL, told silicon.com: "We have doubled the number of servers we can support and halved the number of physical boxes we use."

King added that although there are no exact figures this equates to a quartering of the amount of power being used - because four virtual servers can now run from one physical box.

The ATL previously had 23 to 24 servers with some using only 50 per cent of their capacity but sitting around consuming power for the whole of the time, according to King.

The virtualisation software lets the ATL run different applications on the same server - sometimes based on different operating systems - meaning fewer servers are used.

The VMware software the association is using also allows old hardware to be reused and has allowed the ATL to become hardware-independent.

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King said that gives his organisation more bargaining power when it comes to buying new equipment.

Virtualisation has also helped with a restructuring - with staff changes and new departments being set up.

Using virtualisation tools, King said, applications can easily be moved from one server to another, meaning the ATL was able to match business change "quite quickly" by turning around services to match new department structures.

King added the time it takes to make such changes has been reduced from "two or three weeks to two or three minutes" because there is no need to go through the process of tendering for, choosing, waiting for and then installing the physical hardware usually required to cope with such a restructuring.