Suffolk Life decreases energy use through virtualisation
Saves £30,000 a year
By Antony Savvas | Computerworld UK | Published 06:00, 13 July 12
Suffolk Life, a provider of specialist pensions, has decreased energy consumption while meeting increased customer demand after adopting a "smarter computing" approach.
In just four weeks following completion of the project in April, overall power consumption at Suffolk Life was reduced by 37 percent, delivering projected savings of around £30,000 per year.
Suffolk Life said it is now able to quickly increase infrastructure based on consumer and business demand while lowering its energy consumption.
The company brought in IBM to upgrade and consolidate its server and storage infrastructure to deliver increased flexibility in handling and accessing pension data across the business, while decreasing its carbon footprint and energy costs.
Ian Long, head of IT at Suffolk Life, said: "IBM delivered an updated infrastructure ahead of schedule that enabled us to significantly reduce our power consumption and associated running costs.”
IBM migrated 84 percent of Suffolk Life's existing physical environment to a new virtualised server and storage environment, switching from HP servers to "energy efficient" IBM System x3650 M3 servers.
As a result, Suffolk Life consolidated the number of physical servers from 66 boxes to only six across two sites, plus an additional nine IBM hosts providing the new virtual environment. The project included the migration of 60 business applications to the new environment.
