About the customer
Innovation Group is a provider of IT technology solutions and business process outsourcing services to the insurance market. It is a global organisation employing over 2000 staff with offices located in UK, Germany, France, Spain, North America, South Africa and Australia.
The Challenge
An increase in demand from the business had led to a rise in the volume of IT equipment being hosted in the data centres.
The traditional "one workload, one box" approach to server provisioning inevitably results in too many servers that are underutilised. In fact, for organisations using this approach, typical server utilization is about 5%–15%. Generally, most servers run at or below 20% utilization most of the time, yet still draw full power during the process.
In their ‘State of the Data Centre 2011’ report, Emerson Network Power recently stated that a server purchased in 2011 has an average 45times more compute power than a similarly configured server installed in 2001.
The Solution
As IT equipment was notorious for high-energy consumption even while idle, energy efficiency is a key feature of modern servers. Most vendors now include energy saving features as standard on all new hardware and standards were put in place to ensure these energy saving features were adopted. The standards were developed in conjunction with both internal and external technical teams as well as vendors to ensure a balance between the needs of individual solutions and energy efficiency.
Most IT hardware is now able to display information about its power consumption and by analysing the IT loads, hardware was identified which was a suitable candidate for replacement.
The options to replace the hardware included virtualisation of individual services, consolidation of multiple services on to a single new server and straight upgrades to newer hardware.
The Benefits
In all instances, the increase in processing power improved both the performance and energy efficiency. An unexpected benefit was an increase in physical capacity due to the smaller footprint of the newer hardware.