Case study Virgin Games

Virgin Games, a subsidiary of Virgin.com and part of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, is a gaming web site offering online poker, bingo and casino to UK subscribers.

The company recently moved a number of its servers and storage to a Cable & Wireless datacentre in Guernsey to support its online applications.

A growing awareness of the increasing energy use associated with large-scale IT systems meant the firm wanted to be selective about the equipment it would install.

“With the explosion in online gaming, datacentre power requirements were going through the roof and all datacentres have been putting some quite restrictive caps on how much power we can use,” says Virgin Games managing director Simon Burridge. “As such, we really needed to think about power consumption.”

Buying kit that used less electricity also fitted the Virgin Group’s drive to develop and promote environmentally friendly businesses.

Virgin Games had already deployed virtualised servers on blade chassis and was looking for ways to use its data storage capacity more efficiently to avoid powering up hard disk drives unnecessarily.

After considering hard disk arrays from a number of other storage companies, Virgin Games chose to install Pillar Data Systems’ Axiom product, populated with nine terabytes of serial advanced technology attachment (Serial ATA) hard disk drives.

“Pillar’s Axiom had a nice pedigree behind it and fitted out our requirement for low-energy consumption as well has high input/output performance for SQL throughput ­ we have the whole thing running under 18amps, 9-12 amps, and it delivers near fibre channel speeds but uses cheaper Serial ATA hard disks,” says Virgin Games technical director Leigh Brazier.

Reducing the power consumption in storage systems is just one strategy to reduce Virgin Games’ carbon footprint; the company is committed to applying an environmental filter to everything it does, not least because the Virgin Group demands that business managers send in quarterly reports detailing the steps they have taken to create greener business practices.

“From the IT point of view, we are taking a close look at everything we do,” says Brazier.

“We are looking at the internal procedures for patching software, for instance, and running programs to make sure that PCs get turned off at night. Everything we look at in the IT department, we ask if we can do it in another, more efficient way.”