COOP - Switzerland
Through consistent virtualization of UNIX servers COOP could achieve substantial efficiency improvements.
This success story emerged out of a Campaign of the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, the Swiss telecommunications association and Green IT SIG (Green IT Switzerland). Other Examples of this campaign can be found at https://www.energieschweiz.ch/page/de-ch/so-kann-man-es-umsetzen (German only).
- Reduction of the power consumption of the Unix servers from 151kW by over 80 percent to 25kW.
- The smaller devices have a virtualization level of 1:20 and the big servers reach over 1:80
- Coop's mean server load is now 50-70 percent. Before virtualization, the value was about 20 percent.
- Cost savings in maintenance and operation
- Much faster provision of virtual systems.
Coop is one of the largest retail and wholesale companies in Switzerland and employs almost 80,000 people. Internal and external customers are supported out of the two Datacenters in Basel (450 m2) and Berne (220 m2).The Datacenters already use free cooling (Basel) and reuse of Heat (Berne) and use to a large extent SSD/Flash storage.
To increase efficiency and reduce cost further, COOP decided in 2011 to start a virtualization project. Today almost all applications are virtualized.
- To increase the visibility of Green IT COOP started to measure and report.:
- The energy consumption of ITC in relation to the energy consumption of the whole company.;
- The PUE figures of the Datacenters.