Southern Company saves $13 Million by Virtualizing with Dell
Rapid business growth is a high-class problem. But for Atlanta-based Southern Company, the premier energy provider in one of America’s fastest-growing regions, it was creating major server sprawl. That, in turn, drove up the electricity costs the company had to pay every year and threatened to outstrip its data center capacity.
It was an altogether unsustainable situation.
Thanks to Dell, the company was able to implement a solution that solved its capacity problems and generated estimated capital expenditures savings of U.S. $1.3 million in 18 months. At the same time, it avoided an estimated 2 million kilowatt-hours of power usage, worth approximately U.S. $200,000 and corresponding to some 1,340 tons of avoided carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Southern Company knew it had a problem when it became apparent that, as IT infrastructure director Dan Traynor put it, "we needed to continually add more servers, [yet] we weren’t able to fully utilize the resources we had."
Consolidation was difficult because of concerns among the business units about application conflicts. Instead of sharing the same physical machines, they required their own dedicated servers.
With help from Dell, the IT team decided to virtualize and consolidate its data center servers using VMware® ESX technology. The powerful partitioning provided by VMware would eliminate application conflicts and enable servers to be shared.
The IT team also determined it would need more powerful servers. Dell recommended that Southern Company replace its aging dual-processor servers with a quad-processor architecture, and the team chose to build its virtual server farm using energy-efficient Dell™ PowerEdge™ R900 servers with the Intel® Xeon® processor 7300 series.
The results have been dramatic. The Southern Company IT team has been able to place as many as 26 virtual machines on each of the new PowerEdge R900 servers. Hundreds of older physical machines have been eliminated, alleviating overcrowding and creating space in the data centers for future growth. Watch the video to get more information about Southern Company's transition to Dell PowerEdge servers.
