AFCEA Cuts Data Center Power and Cooling Costs by 50%

The Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA International) has reduced its physical and carbon footprint by transitioning its data center infrastructure into a virtualized environment with the help of HP.

The consolidation cut AFCEA’s data center from 12 servers to two principal servers and two backup servers. The streamlined operations reduced both energy consumption and space requirements, cutting the nonprofit organization’s power and cooling costs by 50 percent.

The virtualized environment increased server utilization from 10 to 60 percent per server, further reducing the need for additional physical servers. It also allows the organization to set up new servers on demand and permits operations to automatically failover, which has substantially reduced downtime, says HP.

HP provided power-efficient HP BladeSystem c3000 enclosures, HP StorageWorks 4400 Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVA4400) and HP ProLiant server blades, which cut the number of AFCEA’s servers by 66 percent and reduced its combined energy and operational costs by 74 percent.

In 2009, HP’s own IT data center projects including consolidation yielded a reduction in energy consumption by 60 percent from 2005 levels.

AFCEA achieved other efficiencies by using HP solutions to consolidate its imaging and printing systems to almost one-half the previous size while increasing its printer capacity and quality.

The overall cost savings from the imaging and printing consolidation allowed AFCEA to upgrade its entire infrastructure within an accelerated timeframe of one year. This exceeded AFCEA’s initial expectation for an annual 20 percent upgrade path per year over a five-year period.

According to a report from CDW Government,77 percent of government agencies at federal, state, and local levels are implementing at least some form of virtualization, including server, storage and client virtualization.