Baillie Gifford, an independent investment management business based in Scotland, has recently had its corporate carbon footprint measured.

The firm is keen to reduce power costs and be environmentally friendly. The green audit helped focus minds, with the IT department’s push towards virtualisation of servers and storage going some way to achieving both aims.

Richard McGrail, head of IT at Baillie Gifford, says that for a company of its size, the firm’s carbon footprint is fairly modest.

“Although as an IT department we have not yet looked at our power bills, it is something we plan to keep an eye on. I have been taking information and have asked people to report to me on capacity use of IT resources,” he says.

“I want to know if we have more equipment than we need as it makes sense to sweat our assets. The key drivers towards virtualisation are cost, management of our real estate, cutting replacement costs, reducing power bills and making the datacentre greener.”

A recent survey by environmental charity Global Action Plan revealed that almost 40 per cent of servers use only half their capacity, so McGrail’s virtualisation drive makes financial and environmental sense.

“We see virtualisation as an overall efficiency drive and are focusing on servers and storage. A number of servers were only using 10 per cent of their capability, which is obviously inefficient. Everyone wants to decrease the carbon footprint of their datacentre as much as they can provided it is not to the detriment of operations,” says McGrail.

The main thrust of virtualisation has until now focused on the development environment. McGrail says that Microsoft Exchange and Oracle remain on physical servers.

“I would receive no thanks if email and other key systems did not work,” he says. “But we are using virtualisation more and more.”

The company has adopted VMware technology and to date has more than 100 virtual servers, compared with 120 physical servers. “We have moved a lot of process control machines onto virtual servers,” says McGrail.

Another good example of virtualisation is a client reporting system, where software looking for reports used to run on individual PCs.

“There could be up to 24 PCs doing that job, but now they are on one virtual server,” says McGrail. “I am keeping an eye on virtual machines to ensure they do not become overloaded but we have a long way to go with virtualisation.

“The 120 physical machines we have could come down to about 20 running individual applications.”

He says that virtualising storage is another priority. “We are using an EMC platform and virtualisation technology from StoreAge. Having to pre-allocate disk space for data does not give good value for money, so we decided to deploy virtualisation as a more flexible way to manage data as it grows,” says McGrail.

He also plans to virtualise the company’s disaster recovery environment and to look at Microsoft Server 2008, due for release next year, which has built-in virtualisation technology.

“We are updating to Vista and eventually we could be running VMware and follow up with Server 2008,” says McGrail.

“We buy servers every two years and run a very efficient shop. Server power requirements are decreasing despite processing power going up, so our datacentre will become increasingly efficient as time goes on.”