The National Trust is a UK charity and the nation’s heritage guardian. The charity has 3.5 million members and 52,000 volunteers and more than 62 million people visit their properties, each year. The National Trust has opened to the public over 300 historic houses and gardens and 49 industrial monuments and mills.
The Need
The National Trust turned to eLINIA to provide managed virtualised infrastructure services and disaster recovery. The aim was to consolidate the existing infrastructure and to migrate their existing infrastructure from a physical to virtual platform to reduce power consumption and increase energy savings.
The Solution
eLINIA helped the National Trust reduce its carbon footprint and minimise costs by slashing data centre energy consumption by almost 87%. This has been done by migrating the National Trust’s IT from a physical to a virtual infrastructure.
eLINIA migrated physical elements of the existing National Trust architecture onto a virtual platform run on HP Blade servers. The virtualised infrastructure was then transferred from eLINIA’s Cardiff data centre across to its green data centre in Slough, which uses renewable energy sources ensuring a significant reduction in the National Trust’s IT carbon footprint.
By using common infrastructure within eLINIA’s Slough datacentre, the National Trust eliminated the need to procure a dedicated network architecture. As a direct benefit, the National Trust is charged only for the internet bandwidth it consumes rather than having to commit to large network services to cater for occasional peaks in internet load.
eLINIA also runs a virtualised recovery platform for the National Trust at its Cardiff data centre, delivering full disaster recovery for a number of business applications, including the National Trust’s Oracle HR platform. eLINIA estimates the virtualised platform will save the National Trust in excess of£10,000 a year compared to its equivalent physical infrastructure.
Commenting on the new agreement, Steve Heath for the National Trust, said: “Protecting the environment is at the heart of what the National Trust does, and we strongly believe that focusing on green IT is key to achieving this goal. Our close partnership with eLINIA will enable us to make significant reductions to our overall energy consumption and therefore also to our carbon footprint.”
Key Benefits
The National Trust is now achieving significant returns from the solution. The following key benefits have been realised from their investment:
- Data energy consumption reduced by up to 70% due to the virtualised platform
- Improved business continuity thanks to full disaster recovery
- Reduced Carbon Footprint due to green hosting
- Saving of £168,000 per annum
- This is primarily a cost reduction exercise reducing overall hosting costs and power consumption, power and cooling savings are estimated at £78,000panov 11th
- Hardware and software cost reduction, cost savings for this are estimated at £80,000pa
- The optimisation of consolidated storage will result in reduced storage costs/back up etc, estimated saving is £10,000pa