Amey is one of the UK's leading support service partners, specialising in the outsourcing of sustainable business solutions. Operating from 200 locations with 8000 employees, Amey has high visibility in its field, and works in partnership with customers across the aviation, central government, defence, education, local government, rail and strategic highways sectors.
Julian Proudfoot, Contract Manager at Amey is responsible for overseeing one of Amey's IT contracts, which is to ALC, a joint venture of Amey Plc and VT Group Plc, for the C' Vehicle Capability Private Finance Initiative.
As a company confident in all that it has achieved and can achieve in the future, Amey is actively involved in developing procedures that integrate key social issues with its business model. Therefore it is no surprise the company takes very seriously its impact on the environment. Sustainable computing and the greening of power-hungry datacenters, is central to enacting its green corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies.
Implementing server virtualisation at this contract, Amey was able to make a substantial impact on its commitment to sustainable computing. A massive reduction in power consumption at the datacenter of over 35% has resulted in considerably improved energy efficiency.
They were able to measure and quantify the extent to which it went green. The new server farm running in a virtual environment used just 67,162kW/h. Before virtualisation, servers required 104,316kW/h. Lower power consumption being used by servers also had a knock-on effect of reducing power demands being made by air-conditioning units. Before virtualisation, air-conditioning required 52,046kW/h. After the project, just 33,523kW/h was needed.
Consolidating growing numbers of physical servers also freed up both floor space and the IT team's time. Support staff have found that time being spent managing physical servers is now spent on other projects, which adds value to their client's business operations.
The new system provides a cost effective fail over solution. In the past, malfunctioning servers had to be physically removed from the network. This resulted in downtime and was inconvenient as well as expensive. The new system enables the team to transparently reallocate servers with no downtime. In the event of a bottleneck or if a server needs to be moved, staff simply move resources around through the management console.
Designing and implementing a green solution required the need for expert advice. Intercept was given the challenge of designing and implementing a robust and cost effective solution. Intercept recognised that maximizing efficiency gains made by rolling out a new system requires careful design and planning. Accordingly, a wide range of diagnostic and analysis tools were applied. PlateSpin PowerRecon, for example, was used to provide further intelligence and forecasting on server metrics.
Intercept then went on to install VMware ESX servers and virtualisation software across the network. They transformed ALC's server architecture from the "usual hardware focused infrastructure, to a modern virtual infrastructure requiring less maintenance with increased scalability and flexibility.