Online gambling group, Betfair, is pleased to announce its increased IT energy efficiency in support of its rapidly growing data centre by adopting environmentally sound policies.
Betfair’s website currently reaches more than 22,000 transactions per second during major events, however, the power required to support such high-performance systems places a heavy demand on energy.
Service Quality Director for Betfair, John Hegarty, said, “We found that in our data centres we were pushing the boundary of how much power we could take. We were under pressure on rack space and so we started with a very pragmatic view that focused on business benefit.”
Betfair operates 60 Solaris-based databases, which in the past ran on individual servers spread across 40 equipment racks. The company now uses virtualisation technology, which reduced the racks to 16 and led to an 84 percent power saving.
Betfair’s storage virtualisation also reduced disk space and cut energy use by 60 percent, while a move from Intel processors to AMD Opteron chips in 70 front-end web servers cut power use there by half.
“It was easy for us to start to save through energy efficiency, and it came straight through to our bottom line,” Hegarty said.
“I would encourage anyone, even if they are not considering green IT, to really look at the savings you could make from getting your operations greener,” he concluded.
In a statement, Betfair said that they will continue working to make environmental concerns a fundamental part of its everyday operations.
