Virtualising Eden

The Eden Project in Cornwall was struggling with its research team's data growth until Milton Keynes-based VAR S3 Consulting stepped in. Caroline Donnelly reports

Overhauling the IT infrastructure of the world's largest greenhouse may not sound like an everyday job for a channel firm, but virtualisation and storage specialist S3 Consulting claims it is.

The company was enlisted by the Eden Project, a Cornwall-based visitor attraction and conservation research hub, to refresh its ageing server estate through the use of virtualisation.

"We had 25 physical servers, some of which had been in place since the early days of the project, that were rapidly approaching end of life," explained Jon Curry, director of HR and ICT at the Eden Project.

"We decided to look into adopting a virtualised platform to avoid the cost of replacing the individual physical servers, and because we were rapidly running out of space in our server room."

The challenge for S3 Consulting was to find a low-cost storage solution that could cope with the high volumes of data generated by the project's research teams. And given the organisation's focus on green issues, it also needed to be environmentally friendly.

"Storage is an issue for us because we generate a lot of data on a temporary basis, as we carry out so many research projects on the natural world and plant life," said Curry.

"We then have to find the optimal way to look after and work with that data, post-project, and manage the ongoing burden of the core business data that a thriving organisation generates."

Since it opened in 2001, the Eden Project has attracted more than 13 million visitors and its activities have contributed more than £1bn to the local economy. It also employs about 500 staff.

Chris Bullock, chief executive of S3 Consulting, said - despite the high-profile nature of the client - the project brief was fairly typical of the demands made by the average SMB.

"I think the only thing that may have been slightly out of the ordinary is that, for a lot of small business customers, green IT and environmental issues are not as much of a focus," he added.

Green thinking

To satisfy the Eden Project's requirements, S3 Consulting decided to lean on the Cisco-based networking infrastructure already in use at the site. This was combined with a new, 3TB NetApp FAS2020 storage array and two VMware ESX virtualisation platforms. The NetApp storage contribution has since been expanded by another 7TB.

This set-up allowed the Eden Project to remove all but five of its physical servers and replace them with virtual ones. It claimed that this move led to a 44,000kg reduction in the site's carbon emissions within 12 months.

"We have not migrated five of the servers because they run specialist applications or they are ones that do not lend themselves easily to working with the VMware stack," said Curry.

Even without virtualising all its servers, the organisation's power and cooling costs are reported to have fallen by 60 per cent, which in turn has helped it recoup some of the £75,000 it spent on its infrastructure refresh.

The decision to include a NetApp storage array, which has deduplication built in, has also been credited with helping the Eden Project claw back about £20,000 of its initial outlay.

"We were told we could get as much as 33 per cent deduplication of all that data, which would have been great," said Curry. "[In reality] we have been consistently getting between 30 and 45 per cent."

The refresh took a month to complete and, having seen a return on that investment, the Eden Project is now working with S3 Consulting on another virtualisation project, this time focused on the desktop.

"We try to factor environmental considerations into every decision we make and one of the reasons we decided to address the desktop next was to prolong the life of the hardware we already have," said Curry.

Laurence James, UK product alliances and solutions marketing manager at NetApp, said the project is a good example of how putting off IT investments to save money can sometimes end up being a false economy.

"Choosing NetApp has allowed the Eden Project to combine efficiency gains with a single platform for extensive virtualisation even to the desktop level," he concluded.