Virtual data centres save power, realty costs

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