Distributor Magirus is encouraging its resellers to promote the green benefits of virtualisation in both servers and storage.
Denise Bryant, director of services and EMC distribution at Magirus, said: “My pitch to resellers at the moment is that while server virtualisation is terrific in terms of its green benefits, it’s only half the story – businesses need to adopt storage virtualisation as well. We’re helping our resellers push this message to their customers.
“What we’re saying is the green benefits don’t just end with virtualisation of the data centre – if VARs couple their virtualisation with storage virtualisation they have a strong green offering.”
Angus Merelie, chief executive of distributor Centia, agreed that virtualisation offered environmental benefits. “Virtualisation, per se, delivers better utilisation of hardware and software, greater ease of management and reduced costs of ownership and operation,” he said. “In doing so, virtualisation vastly reduces power consumption, reduces the need for air conditioning of server rooms and requires less real estate to house IT equipment.”
Reseller Virtual Footprint said it was being urged by both vendors and distributors to push the green benefits of virtualisation.
Paul Oggelsby, virtualisation consultant at Virtual Footprint, told CRN: “Virtualisation offers businesses a real chance to make a contribution to reducing carbon emission, while also improving their bottom line. For example, with virtualisation we can replace 30 physical servers with just two, which will reduce the power needed for running and cooling systems.”
Virtualisation has predominantly been adopted by large corporates, but Virtual Footprint has started helping SMEs take advantage of virtualisation by offering a free consultation.
“We’re finding that SMEs have heard of the term virtualisation, but are not sure how it can benefit them,” Oggelsby said. “We’ll send out a consultant to any SME that contacts us and provide an overview of its IT infrastructure for free. We’ll then provide a plan of how they can benefit from virtualisation. The majority of SMEs tend to take us up on our suggestions.”
Nick Broadbent, UK managing director and EMEA operations, at storage virtualisation vendor DataCore Software, added: “Storage virtualisation and resource saving go naturally hand-in-hand. Our customers and resellers are always pleased with the significant cost and power savings that storage-on-demand solutions provide. By having a central pool of storage that is only allocated when it’s needed, power consumption is minimised and users are able to flexibly maximise and manage existing storage.”
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