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Virtualisation powers up energy group
Case study: How E.ON has cut costs and improved flexibility

By Gemma Simpson

Published: Monday 23 April 2007

Energy company E.ON has shifted to a virtualised infrastructure to help it save money and make the most of its applications.

Since the move to virtualisation, E.ON is using 56 per cent less power and has reduced the amount of heat pouring out from its data centres by more than half.

In August 2005 the company had to consolidate its IT infrastructure by moving five individual business units onto one core system.

E.ON opted for a virtualised environment because of the flexibility it offered, enabling the infrastructure to accommodate all the individual IT requirements of the separate business units.

David Coggon, technical architect for E.ON Information Services, told silicon.com: "We needed to put in an underlying foundation that was flexible to meet all the business units' needs."

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Coggon said the move from separate business units to a consolidated, virtualised environment has produced "significant savings" for the company, with the cost of running the infrastructure cut in half.

E.ON's infrastructure is stored over three tiers - tier one holding the most used applications and therefore needing 100 per cent data availability; tier two holding the less critical applications; and tier three mainly used for archiving and development testing.

Coggon said the flexibility of the Hitachi-based infrastructure also means once an application has been developed within tier three, it can be easily moved up or down the tiers once it is ready for user acceptance testing or going to production.

He added: "That will give us the flexibility to get applications to market a lot quicker."

The company's previous nine data centres were also consolidated into two units and the updated infrastructure has a single interface for controlling the tiers - making the management of the systems much easier, Coggon added.