Tesco increases virtualisation to cut costs

Virtualisation will help Tesco reduce datacentre spend

Tesco has virtualised its main real-time sales systems as the first step of a plan to increase application capacity and reduce datacentre costs.

The systems were migrated to the virtual environment using Citrix XenServer software running on HP blade servers. Use of the technology has already provided benefits to the business such as a 75 per cent increase in the application capacity to 1,500 sales-related messages per second.

The move has already provided cost savings to Tesco and prompted a decision to undertake a major project with the aim of virtualising 1,500 servers with a 10:1 consolidation ratio for physical to virtual servers. The move should provide the retailer with a 70 per cent processor utilisation on the computers, in comparison to the previous six per cent.

While cutting costs, the technology is also supporting Tesco in its goal of reducing carbon emissions from its UK datacentres by 20 per cent.

“The virtualised real-time sales environment uses less than half of the energy of the physical bare metal equivalents, which supports our CO2 targets and means we have already saved a significant amount on our electricity bills,” said Nick Folkes, IT director at Tesco.

“We’re running far more efficiently and the ongoing management of the environment is much simpler.”