Chapter 7. Virtualisation

Of the Green IT projects we took forward within the John Lewis Partnership, server virtualisation was the earliest big success. The right environmental course of action was also shown to be an excellent one commercially. We were shortlisted by Computing magazine for their ‘Green IT project of the year’ award in 2007 for this work.

Recognising the need

Like most IT departments, we need to devote much of our time on projects and tasks to keeping the lights on. However, we also have a regular forum of technical architects which tracks emerging and maturing technologies and helps steer our IT strategy, and in late 2006 there was a growing recognition by that group that what might be termed ‘perfect storm’ conditions (to borrow ...

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