SINGAPORE, 20 OCTOBER 2008 – Singapore-based energy company PowerSeraya has deployed virtualisation products across its two data centres, significantly reducing energy consumption and hardware purchase costs. The company used products from virtualisation vendor VMware.
PowerSeraya claims the virtualisation deployment reduced its energy consumption and carbon emissions by about 70 per cent, which translates to “savings of about 26,000 kWh and 12.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide yearly”, according to a company spokesperson. The company also estimates the rollout has increased the CPU utilisation in its servers from an average of 3 per cent to 20 – 50 per cent..
According to Bernard Lee, vice president, process and innovation, PowerSeraya, concerns about rising energy and real estate costs associated with the company’s business growth led to the decision to cut costs. Three years ago, the company forecast its number of servers would grow from 15 to 70 in over two years, to support the growing business.
Shrinking space
“Adding another 70 servers to our existing infrastructure would have significantly reduced the amount of space available to support future business expansion,” said Lee. “On top of this, increases in the rental prices of commercial properties placed a premium on space at our data centres. Our expected growth also threatened to breach the limited cooling and power supply capacity of our existing buildings.”
PowerSeraya’s expansion includes progressing from being mainly an energy provider to dealing with other forms of energy such as water and oil. The company recently became self-sufficient for its water needs, due to the construction of a new seawater reverse osmosis desalination plant, while its investment arm last year set up a sister company, PetroSeraya, which dealt with the trading of physical oil.
With the virtualisation deployment, the company now runs four physical servers, which host 60 virtual machines, across two data centres.
