BoV goes greener with IT virtualisation

Bank of Valletta has completed the consolidation of its server platforms under its strategy of IT modernisation and its efforts to go green and reduce energy and cooling requirements.

Until a few years ago, the bank had more than 200 stand-alone servers in two data centres servicing internal applications for employees and a number of front-end customer-facing applications.

Throughout this programme, the bank has succeeded in replacing the stand-alone servers with server blades. Combined with virtualisation, the systems have revolutionised the bank’s data centres as they are more scalable, have higher server availability to customers, with on-demand computing power. Power and cooling costs for the new servers have fallen by 30 per cent, helping to drive down total cost of ownership and reduce the bank’s carbon footprint.

Power and cooling costs adjust dynamically based on the load and usage requirements. As the demand for computing power increases, more electrical power would be required, however this adjusts downwards where the load decreases, especially during silent hours.

“Although we invest constantly in IT systems to improve our services to the customer, we also have a duty to improve our green credentials pragmatically, which not only cuts emissions but accrues additional benefits,” BoV’s executive head of information technology Joseph Agius said. “Virtualisation enables our computing power to scale with minimal disruptions so that we can test and introduce new applications.”