BT Aims For More Efficient Data Centers

September 5, 2007

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BT’s data center chief Steve O’Donnell says the company is consolidating many of its systems onto VMware and Solaris containers to physically reduce the number of servers, according to an IT Week interview.

“Rather than have 50 servers running at two percent utilization, we will have two servers running at 50 percent utilization, for example,” O’Donnell said. “We are also evaluating the overall power efficiency of the buildings housing our data centers, where 50 percent of the energy usage goes on cooling. We are looking to use fresh air cooling rather than refrigeration, and to convert AC to DC power at the rack level so we do not have to run uninterruptible power supplies and other bits and pieces.”

O’Donnell also said that BT is working with the European Union and the US Environmental Protection Agency to categorize IT equipment in terms of energy efficiency, in the same way as white goods are categorized now. In January, the EPA announced an initiative to develop an Energy Star specification for enterprise computer servers.

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