Virtual data centres save power, realty costs

Maharashtra-based Chitale Dairy produces 400,000 litres of milk per day and churns out milk by-products. The dairy had 10 physical servers across two data centres and related application systems and was looking to consolidate and streamline its technology environment.

The dairy went in for virtualisation, a method of running multiple independent virtual operating systems on a single physical computer. It is a way of maximising physical resources to maximise the investment in hardware.

In 2007, the company consolidated its IT environment into three physical servers in one data centre. These servers host 20 virtual servers running multiple applications and operating systems.

With this, the firm reduced hardware acquisition cost by 50 per cent. Server deployment time came down from three weeks to a few hours. Crucially, it reduced power, cooling, and real estate costs by consolidating from 10 servers to three.

While virtualisation has been around for more than a decade, its value is being realised only today. The concept allows resource utilisation to go up by 30 to 40 per cent. Costs - power, cooling, hardware - go down by 30-70 per cent.

IBM, a leading player in providing virtualisation solutions, is also one of the biggest adopters of this concept.

Durgadutt Nedungadi, director, marketing and alliances, technology solutions group, HP India, says: "At any given time, server utilisation will not be over 20 per cent, for which power consumption will be over 70 per cent. Clearly, there is a strong case for virtualisation. But to benefit one has to look at the overall IT infrastructure than just a component."

He adds virtualisation is one of the ways to ensure a green IT industry and reduction in carbon emissions.

Research firm IDC India estimates the share of virtualised servers in the industry to double from the current 22 per cent to 45 per cent by the year-end.

Ganesh Mahabala, regional director, VMware, India and Saarc, says: "The average server power consumption in 2001 was around 100 watts (w), currently it is over 400 w. With this, the density of servers in a rack has also increased considerably. We have seen that 1,000 virtual servers reduced carbon dioxide by 12.5 times."