Want to save energy, Turn off your computer room

Many IT departments and small office computer rooms are today faced with the same challenges of power and cooling. Traditional IT teams have historically been focused on maintaining server uptime, and minimising wait times when using line of business databases. Contemporary business stakeholders are increasingly prioritising a new challenge for these often over-stretched teams; that of energy efficiency. Rising fuel costs, and new legislation is making in-house IT support more complex and expensive to provide. Cooling of the computing environment, and the provision of a suitable room with security and fire protection also adds massively to the costs of your annual IT budget.

With hundreds of small to medium businesses spending excessively on their own computing environments, there is a considerable waste of vital energy resources. If multiple companies were to share their computer room with each other, they could all benefit by spending on much of the infrastructure costs just once. If they were also to share the server computers themselves to make use of idle CPU time and wasted memory, imagine the savings to be made.

Traditional virtualisation projects focus on server consolidation solutions. Typical solution stories tell of firms consolidating from over 30 physical servers to around 10 by using virtualisation technology from companies like Vmware. Whilst this indeed offers immediate and obvious benefits, these projects often fall short of the infrastructure savings to be made by not taking the process to its natural conclusion of pooling resources with other firms.

virtualDCS have addressed the common security concerns associated with this concept, and can demonstrate real benefits by addressing the energy challenges, whilst allowing your IT team to focus on traditional IT tasks without the distraction of maintaining the platform.