Council reaps rewards of virtualisation

Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council is rolling out a virtualisation strategy to reduce the council's power bills and deliver applications quicker.

The council has created up to 45 virtual machines, with around 50 traditional servers still running, and is half way through its five-year strategy, which combines server and storage virtualisation.

Steve Clark, senior server support assistant for Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council, said the council runs eight to 10 virtual servers from one physical server, effectively producing a 90 percent power saving.

The virtualised environment is also saving the council time. Because the system has the capacity to expand and increase the number of servers it can hold, the council does not need to spec out and install a new server every time a new application is added to the infrastructure.

Clark said physically adding a new server to the council's infrastructure not only costs around £4,000 but also takes around two weeks — but the virtual system has the capacity to build a server in about 20 minutes.

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Clark added: "Virtualisation produces big time savings and power savings for us day to day. It's just a really simple solution."

Before moving to virtualisation, the council was struggling to maintain its data centre, as the number of physical servers doubled in a year from 20 to 40.

The council's virtualised data centre infrastructure is based on VMware Infrastructure 3 and EqualLogic's PS Series SAN, composed of PS300E and PS100E storage arrays.

Clark said: "With EqualLogic, everything was bundled into just the one price. There were cheaper solutions out there but the cheaper solutions seemed much more complicated and there were a lot of value-added extras included with EqualLogic."

The council is currently running its email and printing systems over the virtualised environment and is now planning to move larger apps over to the virtual environment.