Virtualisation - Going Green

Now more than ever organisations are looking at how to get more from their IT budget and it is for this reason that we believe Virtualisation has to be on your checklist. But where do you even begin to think about Virtualisation and what benefits can it deliver?

It was this topic that motivated over 30 medium to large organisations to come together with industry experts from ITPS, VMware and IBM to discuss on Thursday 11th June at Newcastle’s St James’ Park. This document provides a summary of the morning’s session – we hope you find it of interest.

Kicking off this morning only event with an overview of the latest virtualisation solutions (including their newly released vSphere software) and how it can help organisations to deliver clear cost and time savings was virtualisation expert Graham Hunt, Alliance Manager from market leader VMware. Graham explained that there are a number of benefits which organisations can leverage from :

• Save energy costs on server running and cooling
• Reduce their carbon footprint
• Set up more robust and faster disaster recovery systems
• Restructure server infrastructure
• Reduce time spent loading software and software patches
• Faster deploy new servers
• Reduce maintenance costs as server volumes are optimized
• Reduce staff costs through elimination of the need for out of hour’s maintenance
• Release expensive office space.

Luke Shutler, Platform Manager - System x BladeCenter & iDataPlex from IBM then talked about the hardware requirements for a successful implementation.

Bringing a close to the morning’s discussions was David Redpath of Hertel who outlined his experiences as an ITPS customer who had virtualised. David explained from an operational point of view the cost benefits, ROI and lessons he had learnt from implementing virtualisation. He emphasised that without virtualisation he could not have met the IT budget he had been given to relocate the IT infrastructure when the whole of their head office moved. On top of this the business had benefited from the ongoing reduced costs of running and cooling the reduced number of servers. Finally, by virtualising the infrastructure it had made it far easier for the business to add newly acquired companies into the IT infrastructure – a major headache previously.

The feedback from the event was extremely positive and attendees were offered a free virtualisation check which has since been scheduled for each of them. If you would also like to take advantage of this offer then simply call ITPS on 0191 442 8300.