Virtualisation - Securing a greener tomorrow with yesteryear´ technology

In April 2010 the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) scheme became compulsory for British-based companies that have high energy consumption. The scheme is designed to encourage companies to reduce their energy consumption and as a result reduce their CO₂ emissions. The government´s goal is a 60% reduction in emissions over the next forty years. Comprehensive research has shown that data centers are energy intensive and in many cases the hardware is underutilised. This leads to energy being wasted unnecessarily. We present a critical comparison of a virtualised data centre infrastructure and an infrastructure that consists exclusively of physical servers. Our investigation shows how server virtualization can better utulise the data centre hardware and consequently reduce the power consumption and carbon emissions. The case study reports an extensive research phase to identify main reasons for data centre virtualisation. The data centre is then modelled, based on server information from one of the data centres at the University of Greenwich. We emulate a virtualised infrastructure to contrast against the physical infrastructure. These two models are then critically compared and the potential carbon emission reductions are analysed. Our results show that a virtualised data centre infrastructure could potentially reduce carbon emissions by approximately 31%.