SABMiller Creates a Sustainable Virtual Reality

Alliston Ackerman & Alarice Padilla

8/17/2009

SABMiller plc (www.sabmiller.com), one of the world's largest brewers and beverage companies with interests in more than 60 countries across six continents, is committed to being a responsible company. Because data centers are one of the world's fastest-growing energy consumers, SABMiller RUS, the division of SABMiller that distributes 10 brands in the Russian beer market, sought an innovative green solution for its IT environment that could save energy as well as money.

Data Center Drawbacks

The IT department at SABMiller RUS provides a variety of information services to its internal business users, allocating a dedicated server computer for each service. The need to quickly deploy IT services led to an increase in the number of servers the company has to maintain. In fact, the main data center grew to accommodate 48 servers.

However, the "one service, one server" approach resulted in the underutilization of the company's servers. As the demand for services grew, SABMiller RUS had to tolerate an increasingly idle IT infrastructure.

"Each infrastructure component, besides the equipment purchase costs, entails many additional costs, such as rack space, cooling, power, a port in the switch, a port in the management console and extended support," says Mikhail Tolchelnikov, IT service delivery manager at SABMiller RUS. "All of which adds up to a considerable amount, despite the server working at only several percent of its capacity."

SABMiller RUS recognized that it could use virtualization technology to reduce the number of physical servers in its data center, consolidate workloads as well as enhance the availability of applications and services. The company initiated a project to virtualize its server environment with Hyper-V virtualization technology, a feature of the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 operating system (www.microsoft.com). SABMiller RUS also chose to manage its virtual server environment by implementing the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

The virtual environment was deployed on six HP physical servers (www.hp.com) in three clusters with two nodes each, and an additional cluster in its test lab. The physical servers that were no longer needed in the data center were sent to regional offices.

Sustainable Benefits

In most data centers, half of the energy consumed is associated with running hardware and the other half with cooling. Because SABMiller RUS purchases fewer physical servers for its virtualized environment, it drove an additional 43 percent savings in energy costs for power and cooling.

The benefits don't end there: By virtualizing its physical servers, SABMiller RUS reduced IT costs by a total of 48 percent, and savings in individual areas were even higher. The IT department saved 75 percent in provisioning costs due to increased efficiency, and realized a 64 percent savings by avoiding both planned and unplanned down time (see Solution Snapshot).

"The virtualization project based on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V helped us to cut infrastructure costs by 48 percent, and we expect a return on investment of an estimated 234 percent," adds Nina Tatsiy, IS manager, SABMiller RUS.

Moving forward, SABMiller RUS intends to enhance efficiencies in the virtual environment by automating infrastructure management and implementing automatic event monitoring and response tools.

HINTS OF GREEN

Green IT

Using fewer physical servers, SABMiller RUS drove a 43 percent savings in energy costs for power and cooling, among other benefits.

H2O Savings

SABMiller PLC launched a new water strategy with a target to reduce average water use per hectoliter of beer by 25 percent by 2015.

Energy & Carbon Goals

In June 2009, SABMiller PLC announced that by 2020 it will reduce fossil fuel emissions from its beers by 50 percent per liter of beer produced.

Words of Wisdom

"If you haven't been considering IT virtualization deployment, I recommend that you do so -- this is the right time to think about it. Not only is it a quick ROI, but it offers some great environmental benefits, which is something that is also very important to us." --Nina Tatsiy, Information Systems Manager, SABMiller RUS

Enterprise Development

Encouraging enterprise development in its value chains is one of SABMiller's global focus areas. In 2010, the company plans to increase the number of smallholder farmers within the value chain.

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