Multinational shipping company K Line is in the second stage of a virtualisation project to cut energy bills by £50,000 per year and reduce its carbon footprint as part of its commitment to green IT.

“As a shipping company we have an environmental impact and we are very conscious of reducing our carbon footprint by having the most modern ships with the cleanest power source possible,” says Tim Hawkes, systems manager for K Line.

“We have recycled toners for seven years and paper for the past five. Now it is coming down to the IT department to reduce power consumption.”

The company’s UK operation worked with consultancy Panacea Services to look at how virtualisation could reduce the firm’s server estate and save energy.

In the first phase of the process, K Line replaced 15 servers used by developers for testing and development with two blade servers installed with virtualisation software from VMware.

“We wanted to see what we could do with virtualisation, so we started off with the non business-critical applications; if we lost the environment it would not cause massive problems,” says Hawkes.

K Line is now evaluating how virtualisation can be used for production servers that run business-critical applications such as email, web sites and marketing.

The firm is also using technology to assess which servers can be virtualised. PlateSpin PowerRecon tools analyse processor and memory use, and disk performance, to see if a server is suitable.

Investment in new servers is also part of the virtualisation project, with 16 servers being replaced by eight HP c-Class blades.

“So far, five out of the eight c-Class server blades are running virtualisation software,” says Hawkes. “We realised that we could not make huge energy savings by phasing out older servers as they have a single processor and a single core as compared with the new servers, which have a quad processor and quad core.”

In August, the server estate will be moved to a new datacentre as part of a disaster recovery project, because there are power issues with the current site. With the new servers running virtualisation software, K Line will only need four racks for servers instead of six, cutting power and cooling costs.

“Our goal is to reduce our server estate by 50 per cent, and more if possible ­ – which will save us £50,000 per year. Our return on investment in new hardware and VMware will be between 12 and 18 months,” says Hawkes.

Stage three of the virtualisation project will see K Line’s London office becoming a 100 per cent virtualised disaster recovery environment.

“It will be even easier to quantify savings after the move to the new datacentre. I like to look at power and amps, not carbon footprint, as they are easily quantifiable,” says Hawkes.

“But what we are doing is part of a green commitment and the same technology used to consolidate and virtualise the London office will be rolled out in the Hamburg office.”