Conservation charity WWF cut the energy consumption of its UK server environment by more than 50 per cent by implementing virtualisation technology.

Using software from VMware, WWF moved from 13 servers to four, reducing the electricity needed to power the hardware as well as the amount of air conditioning required to cool it. In environmental terms, this equates to 12,600 fewer tonnes of CO2 emissions per year, not to mention the associated cost savings.

But the use of virtualisation has operational benefits as well, says WWF UK network manager Ian Exton.

‘We wanted to virtualise because it would allow us to be more responsive to business change,’ he says.

“People now say to us: can you do this and can you do it within a month? And we can react to that, whereas before we had to either say no or we had to cobble together something on existing servers.”

The organisation first experimented with VMware for a development server in 2005, before running live systems on a virtualised server in 2006.

Earlier this year, a new storage area network infrastructure allowed WWF to virtualise all its operational servers.

VMware was chosen for its support for multiple operating systems. WWF uses a combination of Windows, Linux and Novell Netware. The new system also improved resilience and disaster recovery capabilities.

“We wanted to increase the resilience to failure of our servers because virtualised servers can be moved around between boxes, whereas real servers generally can’t or at least it’s a lot more trouble,” says Exton.

“We created a farm of four servers, and as a result we used existing hardware to create a mirror environment to our disaster recovery site. It’s typical for any organisation that starts to play with virtualisation to go through that process.”

The biggest benefit for WWF is the ability to focus on its core business of wildlife conservation.

“The cash saved goes straight back on conservation if we’re not spending it on electricity,” says Exton.

“The less we spend on IT overheads and the like, the more we can spend on wildlife and campaigning.”

Exton says he would encourage other organisations to look to WWF’s example of green computing.

“If you look at virtualisation as a way to lower your carbon footprint and IT costs, you will make yourself more compliant with new business initiatives. Many companies are now looking at their CO2 as well as the cost of IT and they’re linking them for the first time and achieving both objectives. Virtualisation helped us to do that,” he says.