Technology Corner

The IT industry has been blamed over the years for the large amount of carbon emissions due to the many large servers that run in all of their buildings, that need to be kept cool and eat up a lot of electricity. It has also received bad press due to the power hungry manufacturing process required. As this industry is worth in excess of £30billion a year this is a lot of emissions each year! Recently the industry has had to listen to the calls to change, and certain economical solutions have come to the fore.

This is where Virtualization comes in. Virtualization is when a physical server that in the past would have done only one job is turned into a much more economical piece of hardware by running many “virtual” jobs at the same time. This saves companies money however it also helps the environment at the same time. In the past all jobs would have to be done on one server as it is then easier to identify errors as they occur because there would be no ambiguity. However this led to large amounts of servers in air conditioned rooms, and as such became harmful for the environment. Now virtualization allows one server to perform many tasks but these tasks SEEM to the user as separate as they were when they were on different servers, so the error detection is still the same as is the user’s perception, but the space requirements and strain on the environment are much better.

Microsoft Hyper V is one such virtualization product, and helps the companies to reduce their carbon footprint and save money by managing the virtual servers in the building, and presenting it in a much less complex interface to the network administrators. It simplifies their jobs and allows them plenty more time to perform other, less menial tasks. To the companies it will probably be very much a secondary priority to help the environment but freeing up time and resources will definitely make them take notice.