Minimizing the environmental impact and maintaining cost effectiveness of its operations has always been a core requirement of PowerSeraya's business.
"When we reviewed our forecast growth numbers in 2005, a key business concern was how to expand the business while still managing hardware, power and real estate costs," revealed Bernard Lee, VP of Process and Innovation Group, PowerSeraya.
PowerSeraya Limited is in the business of producing, wholesaling, trading and retailing of energy, with a primary focus on electricity. It is one of Singapore's largest electricity generators, supplying about 30% of the country's energy needs.
Lee recalled that in 2005, when PowerSeraya forecasted that its existing 15 servers would need to grow to 70 servers by 2007, the organization's IT infrastructure team focused on identifying and evaluating effective physical server consolidation strategies.
"Our expected growth also threatened to breach the limited cooling and power supply capacity of the existing building infrastructure."
And adding another 70 servers to its existing infrastructure would significantly reduce the amount of space needed to house these servers, leaving little room for expansion.
Moreover, increases in the rental prices of commercial properties have placed a premium on space at its HarbourFront datacenter, said Lee.
"For every major application we implemented, we needed eight to 12 servers to host development, quality assurance, production and disaster recovery environments," Lee added.
In addition, its IT master plan for the next two years highlighted that it would face a high number of server requests from its business solutions team and users.
Resolving challenges
Instead, PowerSeraya decided to consider tapping on virtualization solutions to expand the capacity of its existing servers to resolve its challenges.
After conducting initial research and proof of concept work, PowerSeraya decided to use VMware as its platform to implement server virtualization.
Lee was excited with the opportunity to reduce wasted server hardware resources and manage power consumption using features such as VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM), said Lee.
While not all PowerSeraya production applications were certified to operate on the platform, the benefits of VMware outweighed any concerns and the organization effectively mitigated a significant number of the risks, said Lee.
Most development, quality assurance and disaster recovery servers are now hosted on VMware infrastructure.