SOU Sustainability Council
IT Sustainability Initiatives
Conversion to Virtual Servers
As an energy conservation and cost reduction measure, the SOU Information Technology Department is in the process of replacing its aging physical servers with a virtual server environment. The benefits of using virtual server technology include:
- Consolidation of the services of many physical servers onto a single more powerful server in order to optimize use of hardware resources. Other then the fact that the virtual servers are sharing the same hardware, they behave and perform exactly the same as physical servers.
- Higher uptime, quicker failover, and overall increased robustness and flexibility in the IT infrastructure.
- Cost savings through:
- Reduced capital outlay for server equipment
- Energy cost savings achieved through the reduction of electricity consumed by having less servers and reduced demand on data center air-conditioning systems.
- Labor savings achieved through the efficiencies of managing virtual servers verses physical servers. Labor savings are redeployed to meet ever increasing demand for IT services, systems, and solutions.
In the proposed virtual server environment, all physical servers including the core campus information systems and departmental database services would be consolidated to run on seven physical servers in a Virtual Server configuration using disk space from the centralized Storage Area Network (SAN).
