The
John Lewis Partnership is saving £2,500 a week on power by
using server virtualisation at its Bracknell and London
datacentres.
The retail group started its
virtualisation project in 2006 to reduce the number of servers
it required because it was running out of space and power at both
datacentres.
But Dave Barker, technical architect in the IT department for
John Lewis, told Computer Weekly the project has significantly cut
power consumption.
"Although the main business driver was to win time to plan a
customised new datacentre to replace our London facility, the power
saving fits in nicely our green IT initiative," he said.
Virtulisation allowed the firm to keep pace with business
demands for server capacity without rushing into any decisions
about setting up a new datacentre.
"We have reduced the overall server count across the two
datacentres from 450 to 400 while at the same time provisioning 392
additional servers," said Barker.
This compression rate of around 16:1 has saved John Lewis over
£700,000 that would have been spent on new servers to meet business
demand.
"This means we had 18 months to decide where to site the new
datacentre as well as the resources for several IT projects that
otherwise would not have been possible," said Barker.
Another business benefit of virtualisation, said Barker, was
that John Lewis was able to isolate all servers involved in
processing credit and debit card payments in a protected
enviroment.
"This meant that only a limited number of servers had to be
compliant with the payment card industry data security standard
instead of every server in the organisation, saving time and
effort," he said.
John Lewis plans to migrate to a new datacentre within the next
18 months, with a target of 95% virtualisation.
"The default will be for any new server to be virtualised, so
the business will have to show a very good reason for any
application to be put on a physical machine," said Barker.
The power saving has now become an important element in the
firm's green IT initiative led by
Gary Hird, technical strategy manager for the John Lewis
Partnership.