How Virtualisation Makes Data Centres Greener

A lot has been written in the last few years about how virtualisation makes data centres `greener,' but how much is hype and how much is tangible benefit that IT managers can prove - as far as it is reasonable to do so - to their line management?

At the Storage Expo 2009 event, held in London in mid-October this year, Owen Cole, technical director with F5 Networks, the financial services networking and IT specialist, explained how this is possible.

Cole pointed out that green IT is all very well, but that most organisations also have to worry about another type of green, the green on the bottom line of its financial reports.

The good news, he said, is that there is some degree of overlap between these green computing initiatives.  

"Reducing power consumption and management expenses, and increasing efficiency of existing resources through consolidation and virtualisation decreases both the impact of devices on the environment as well as on IT's increasingly tightening budget," he explained.