Data centres by nature consume a lot of energy and demand for power will continue to grow as the volumes of digital information that companies store and process continue to grow. With this come increasing energy costs and cooling requirements.

According to Douw Gerber at Securicom, value added distributor for Cloudistics in Africa, about a third of the equipment running in a typical data centre consumes electricity without doing any computing. By decommissioning servers that are not being fully utilised and consolidating multiple independent servers can help to improve efficiency as well as performance.

"Improving energy efficiency of computing systems is becoming a priority for businesses with ‘green goals' as well as those wanting to reduce costs. The average physical server utilisation rate sits at around 15% of maximum but depends much on the service and it can be even as low as 5% with peaks at around 60% of maximum.

"That is an awfully high amount of computing power sitting idle while consuming electricity. Low utilisation reduces the efficiency of power supplies causing over 10% losses in power distribution within the data centre."

According to Gerber, Securicom recently moved a critical software platform which was housed on several physical servers to a Cloudistics appliance.

"By doing this, we have managed to reduce the server footprint in our data centre from two 42U cabinets to a single 6U space consumed by the Cloudistics appliance," he says.

Cloudistics is the first on-premise cloud in the world to provide for virtualization, compute, network and storage; natively and imbedded, on one platform to deliver a premium private cloud experience. With the new Cloudistics appliance's advanced server virtualisation technologies, it is possible to combine several virtual servers into one physical computing stack. In this way, these technologies make it possible to take better advantage of hardware and electricity resources.

"Virtualisation on a platform such as Cloudistics enables you to use fewer physical servers, thus decreasing electricity consumption as well as waste heat. One watt-hour of energy savings at the server level results in roughly 1.9 watt-hours of facility-level energy savings. This is achieved by reducing energy waste in the power infrastructure (power distribution unit, UPS etc) and reducing the energy needed to cool the waste heat produced by the server," explains Gerber.

He continues: "Consolidation and virtualisation have long been touted as a way to decrease both energy consumption and cooling costs in the server room. Cloudistics simplifies this because its software-defined technology natively converges network, storage, compute resources, virtualisation, and management into a single platform. The stack is very compact, starting at 6U, and due to its high density is extremely efficient. Bringing a huge reduction in data centre footprint, the Cloudistics appliance presents meaningful opportunities for companies to reduce both power and cooling costs in the server room."

The sole distributor of Cloudistics in Africa, Securicom provides managed and professional services to companies in the region. The company, one of South Africa's leading IT security vendors and managed service providers, operates two geographically redundant, highly secure data centres in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Cloudistics represents an unprecedented opportunity to optimise local companies data centres infrastructure while benefitting from a premium private cloud experience.