Online gambling group Betfair has announced that it has boosted its IT energy efficiency in support of its rapidly growing data centre by adopting environmentally sound policies.
Betfair receives more than four billion page impressions per week on its website and reaches more than 22,000 transactions per second during big events. But, the power required to support such high-performance systems places a heavy demand on energy.
“We found that in our data centres we were pushing the boundary of how much power we could take,” said John Hegarty, Service Quality Director for Betfair. “We were under pressure on rack space and so we started with a very pragmatic view that focused on business benefit.”
The company operates 60 Solaris-based databases, which previously ran on individual servers spread across 40 equipment racks. Using virtualisation technology, this was reduced to 16 racks and led to an 84 percent power saving.
In addition, storage virtualisation reduced disk space and cut energy use for this application by 60 percent while a move from Intel processors to AMD Opteron chips in 70 front-end web servers cut power use there by half.
“It was easy for us to start to save through energy efficiency and it came straight through to our bottom line,” said Hegarty. “I would encourage anyone, even if they’re not considering green IT, to really look at the savings you could make from getting your operations greener.”
Betfair said that its development of a green IT strategy did not stop at the data centre and it is working to make environmental concerns a fundamental part of its everyday operations. |
• 
• 
• 
• 
Calendar 
Home
