Power savings through virtualization

As we finally shut down our old SAN we were able to see the effect of virtualization on our power consumption today and we were quite amazed by the results. So far, 33% into our project, we have been able to reduce our power requirement in datacenter 1 by 3.7 KiloWatts (18.7 down to 15.0) and in datacenter 2 by approximately 1.5 KiloWatts. Unfortunately I am not able to calculate a true cost savings from this as I don’t have the pricing for our energy but when we finish it will be significant.

Because we are virtualizing everything to one production datacenter we will eventually be able to shut down datacenter 2 for production (which will mean less stringent requirements on cooling, UPS etc.). It will be interesting to see what the final outcome is for the project.