Virtualisation can reduce power bills

Companies can reduce the requirement of servers by using the virtualisation technology,which would lead to a commensurate reduction in the use of air-conditioners and UPS.

Almost all IT majors—like VMware,Microsoft,Google,Oracle,Cisco—offer virtualisation technology in India. Mitel,a Canadian company,which recently joined the bandwagon,says virtualisation would help companies reduce the requirement of communication servers by 85%.

“If a company has 100 servers,each running a separate application,possibly the full capacity of servers is not being fully utilised. But by creating virtual servers,the requirement of original servers can be reduced by 85%. That leads to a commensurate reduction in the usage of air-conditioning for cooling and UPS for power back-up. Besides,it also reduces space requirement for data centres,” said Gwilym Funnel,Mitel’s vice-president for Asia Pacific operations,while on a recent visit to India.

“On an average,one server can consume 500-800 unit of electricity per hour. And savings on electricity cost could be as much 50-60%,” Funnel told FE.

Funnel says Mitel technology also allows companies to dispense with PBX,since the company has virtualised its data,video and voice transfer technologies.

“Delay may not be a big issue in data transfer but voice communications with latency cannot be meaningful. It has to be real-time. That was the reason virtualising voice communications was a big technological challenge for us,” the Mitel executive said.

“However,after 18 months in lab,we made a breakthrough in the final frontier of virtualisation by cracking the latency problem,” Funnel said.

Such technologies widen the scope of virtualisation and,of course,energy saving.