Virgin Games sees no sacrifices in green datacentre

One of the biggest obstacles to any green technology initiative is the often mistaken belief that environmentally friendly products are less reliable, more expensive and of lower quality than their traditional polluting counterparts.

Whether it's recycled paper, a TV without a standby switch, or a more energy efficient PC, there is a commonly held conception that selecting the greener option means sacrificing something in terms of quality.

It is a myth Leigh Brazier, IT and Operations Director at online gaming company Virgin Games, is keen to challenge as the company puts the finishing touches to a new datacentre it is currently developing with its partner Cable & Wireless in Guernsey.

"We were planning to develop a new datacentre site and for the first time we found that the products were converging to make developing a really green facility possible," explains Brazier. "We can now get high availability, good through put and everything else we need while delivering big energy savings – we haven't had to sacrifice anything."

Like any executive within the Virgin Group following boss Richard Branson's high-profile green commitments, Brazier was under orders to do everything possible to limit his department's environmental footprint while at the same time meeting the demand for Virgin Games' growing online gaming web sites.

According to Brazier, this dual goal has been made attainable by the necessity to build a new datacentre on a green field site - which made it far easier to deploy new more energy efficient technologies - and the emergence of three innovations that have entered the technology mainstream in the last few years: blade architectures; virtualisation; and dynamic consolidated storage.

Virgin Games opted to install HP 's c-Class blades, which boast a number of cooling and power supply innovations designed to enhance energy efficiency, and at the same time started to deploy "virtualisation in a fairly big way".

Brazier said the use of VMware virtualisation software looks set to deliver significant increases in server utilisation and as a result the company is now looking to expand use of virtual machines as part of a "second phase project" for the new datacentre.

"In the past it just wasn't possible to push boxes harder [in terms of utilisation], not necessarily because of the boxes but because of management and security concerns," explains Brazier. "It was always easier if you needed a new function to add a new box – it might have led to datacentre sprawl but putting more functions in one box meant the threat index increased."

In contrast, virtualisation software allows administrators to run a number of different servers on the same piece of hardware. "You can manage the virtual machines as individual machines even though they are on the same bit of hardware," continued Brazier. "It brings down the security and management problems of having multiple functions on one server, but drives up the server utilisation rate meaning you need far fewer servers."

Virgin Games' green datacentre strategy was completed with the deployment of a consolidated storage platform, which promises to provide tiered storage functionality from within a single, centralised, energy efficient platform.

Brazier said that as with the company's interest in virtualisation software, the main environmental benefit from this centralised storage technology - which it procured from storage specialist Pillar Data Systems - is found in its ability to deliver utilisation rates that are three times higher than traditional alternatives and consequently limit the need to deploy large numbers of arrays.

"I've spoken to people running the Pillar kit at really high utilisation rates - it runs happily at up to 85 percent capacity," said Brazier. "That's where you can get the green savings."

Chris Jones, vice president for Europe at Pillar, said that these high utilisation rates were the result of the data de-duplication and compression software combined with dynamic cache and bandwidth provisioning functionality that is designed to maintain performance levels as utilisation increases. "Very few companies even get close to filling up a storage device because they traditionally get constraints on performance," he explained. "But dynamically provisioning cache and bandwidth as it is required means you can get high performance at higher capacity."

Quantifying the energy, cost and carbon savings that will result from this triumvirate of technologies has proved difficult for Virgin Games because the new facility has no base line to compare its performance against. But Brazier is insistent the overall impact of these new energy efficient systems is a datacentre that is not only "as close to minimum power draw as possible", but also fully in line with the Virgin Group's green commitments.