August 2009

Going Green is a hot topic these days, and the concept is having an impact on the way people think about business best practices in general. Moreover, with rising power costs and issues regarding reliability, supply and capacity escalating it made perfect sense to Compuscan to become a “green supporter” by making use of virtualization technology..

Virtualization is a proven “green” software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people compute. It is in essence the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or a network resource i.e. a huge energy saver.

Compuscan has chosen to implement server virtualization software that allows us to run multiple operating systems on a host server concurrently i.e. different virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical machine.

This technology reduces Compuscan’s energy consumption by up to 80%, which results in an enormously positive impact on the environment i.e. the “green” effect.

According to estimates, 1.2 million workloads run in virtual machines, this represent a collective power saving of about 8.5 billion kWh— this is more electricity than is consumed annually in all of South Africa for heating, ventilation and cooling. Astonishing!

Compuscan is not only saving energy, we are also reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into the atmosphere. At nearly 4 tons of CO2 emitted annually per server, servers produce a total of more than 80 million tons of CO2 per year globally. This is more than is emitted from the country of Thailand and more than half of all countries in South America.

Except for the environment, our new server virtualization software also has profound benefits in store for you, as our valued client:

• Disaster recovery and high availability of our services
• Ability to provide you with better, more cost effective applications / solutions
• Complete data protection
• Protection from communication failures
• Improved service levels
• Compuscan has the ability to provide you with new applications much faster
• Vast improvement in recovery time from unplanned downtime