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Information-age.com

The success of a server virtualisation project at UK supermarket chain Tesco has led the company to pursue an almost all-virtual IT infrastructure strategy.

“Our overall goal is to have everything running on virtual, with the exception of only a couple of systems,” Nigel Chubb, IT service manager for the company’s operations and infrastructure division, told Citrix’s iForum user conference today.

But just one year ago the company felt very differently. “At that point we had no intention to virtualise,” said Chubb.

That was changed by an independent review of its data centre capacity, which Tesco had believed to be sufficient for the following five years’ requirements. “The review found that we had less than a year of growth in our data centres,” said Chubb. a finding that made the company reassess virtualisation

The topic was made all the more pressing due to the planned roll-out of Tesco‘s Real Time Sales application.“If we hadn’t done something drastic, we would have had to build another data centre,” said Chubb.

The company decided to virtualise its 1500-strong Wintel server farm, which was then a significant drain on resources, consuming 30% of all data centre power but with utilisation as low as 6%.

It plumped for Citrix’s XenServer product, Chubb said, because of the company’s dedication to the project. As well as deploying virtual technology, the company replaced all of the physical infrastructure supporting its Wintel systems excluding the network. It adopted HP blade servers, housed in a hot aisle containment unit from APC.

I was checking out Information Age and came along this article talking about Tesco using virtualization of their wintel server estate to assist with their data center capacity issues which included looking at HP blade servers and technologies from APC. It’s always great to see what technologies are being used and what benefits they are bringing in terms of power and space in the data center, do check it out.

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