A
virtualisation project at
Newcastle-under-Lyme is set to save taxpayers £280,000 over
three years and contribute to the borough council's environmental
programme.
The project, which began as an experimental study 30 months ago,
has enabled the Staffordshire council to cut the number of physical
servers it uses from about 50 to six. The servers run 40 virtual
machines under
VMware ESX.
Steve Clark, network support assistant at the council, said the
initial aim was to cut the costs for powering, maintaining and
cooling the server farm.
"A cheap trial system evolved into a full-scale solution," he
said. "We started with one host server and a handful of small
applications. That worked well, but we were concerned about it
being a single point of failure, so we added another physical
server.
"At that stage we were running
GSX [VMware's entry level product] on two physical servers with
14 virtual servers. Then we went for ESX [VMware's top-end product]
and added another 12 virtual servers and decommissioned the
redundant physical servers."
Clark estimated that the council would save at least £280,000 in
running costs over the next three years, and possibly the same
again from cuts in hardware costs, maintenance, time and space. "We
don't need to buy another server for the next 18 to 24 months," he
said.
"Some applications, typically those with lots of simultaneous
users, need a dedicated server. But it was a shock to find many of
the original servers were so under-utilised that was a real
eye-opener."
The council's system consists of six HP dual-processor servers
and a 1.2Tbyte EqualLogic storage area network with about 450 PCs.
It runs 35 main applications, of which about half have been
virtualised so far.
App virtualisation gaining acceptance >>
Newcastle-under-Lyme >>
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