The London Borough of Hillingdon is on course to cut its
power requirements for legacy servers by 82% after using
virtualisation software to consolidate 40 servers onto
three.
The council is halfway through a two-year project to virtualise
70 legacy servers. Data from the 40 servers already virtualised is
now held on three HP DL585 servers with AMD dual-core
processors.
The power consumed by the new servers is 3,450 kilovolt amperes
(kVAs) per annum, compared with the 18,720 kVAs used by the 40
legacy servers - an 82% reduction.
Hillingdon's IT department said it was unable to put a final
figure on the cost savings, but the project is expected to pay for
itself relatively quickly.
Beth Hague, project manager at the council, said, "Our target
was the old NT4 legacy systems because the old hardware was almost
impossible to maintain. Now we have proven the concept with the
legacy servers, we are looking at production applications."
The council's call centre application, Onyx eShop, was the first
to be virtualised, using software from VMware. The domain
controllers have also been migrated.
An application for regulating private property will be
virtualised before the end of the financial year, but the council
has no plans to virtualise its largest systems.
Hague said, "Virtualising servers can be an expensive way of
using VMware. We are trying to capture systems when they are new
applications for the council."
Hillingdon's finance, payroll, personnel and council tax
collection systems will also stay on legacy servers because the
council has outsourced them to Northgate. The council's contract
with its previous outsourcing supplier came to an end at the start
of the virtualisation project, before the IT function was ready to
insource and virtualise the applications.
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