Tesco has completed the first stage in its project to virtualise its entire UK datacentre

The supermarket giant has virtualised the servers for its Real Time Sales system, which processes all the data from every till across the UK, increasing its capacity to 1,500 transactions a second. By the end of April, all 1,500 servers will be virtualised using Citrix XenServer, bringing significant energy savings to the supermarket and helping it reach its ‘commitment to the community’ on carbon emissions.

Nick Folkes, IT director at Tesco, comments: “After conducting a major evaluation of virtualisation providers, we went with Citrix based on the strength of the Xen technology, the ability XenServer has to provide high levels of performance for heavy duty 64-bit applications, its licensing model and its UK-based engineering team – decisions that have already paid off for us. The virtualised RTS environment uses less than half of the energy of the physical bare metal equivalents, which supports our CO2 targets and means we have already saved a significant amount on our electricity bills. We’re running far more efficiently and the ongoing management of the environment is much simpler. While our primary goal in working with Citrix and HP was to create a more flexible IT infrastructure, the consolidation benefits are significant.”