25 Feb 2009

Companies look to virtualisation as data centre space gets low

More companies are looking to virtualisation technologies as they run out of space and aim to reduce their carbon footprint.

Lancaster University is one such organisation, which discovered it was running out of data centre space and so adopted virtualised systems.

The education institute also wanted a system which supports disaster recovery and business continuity, moving from direct attached storage to storage area network.

Matt Storey, systems technical coordinator for its information systems services at Lancaster University, tells Computing.co.uk: "We realised, we were hitting our cooling and power capacity at one of our datacenters and we started looking around for technology to counter this."

He says adopting a version of VMware's ESX Server reduced physical space taken up by the data centres and also led to it eliminating some power used.

Mr Storey adds that the technology allowed the university to increase its "peripheral connectivity, such as KVM cabling".

Richard Bartlett, an IT consultant writing for CambridgeNetwork, says virtualisation technologies, such as software-as-a-service, have low upfront and maintenance costs.