(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Breaking with antiquated tradition, the National Trust, a charity that helps preserve and present more than 300 historic houses and gardens, and 49 industrial sites in the UK, will be provided disaster recovery and managed, virtualized infrastructure services from managed hosting provider eLINIA (www.elinia.com).
According to eLINIA’s announcement this week, a new contract extension between the National Trust and UK telecom BT (www.bt.com), which relies upon eLINIA as a hosting partner in addition to other agreements. According to the contract, eLINIA will help the National Trust reduce its carbon footprint and minimize costs by slashing data centre energy consumption by nearly 70 percent.
eLINIA will be migrating physical elements of the existing National Trust architecture onto a virtual platform run on HP Blade servers at eLINIA’s carbon neutral data centre in Slough, near London, ensuring a significant reduction in the National Trust’s IT carbon footprint.
“Protecting the environment is at the heart of what the National Trust does, and we strongly believe that having a green IT strategy in place is key to achieving this goal,” National Trust IT operations director Steve Heath said in a statement. “Our close partnership with eLINIA will enable us to make significant reductions to our overall energy consumption and therefore also to our carbon footprint.”
eLINIA will also run a virtualized recovery platform for the National Trust at its Cardiff, Wales data centre, delivering full disaster recovery for several business applications, including the National Trust’s Oracle (www.oracle.com) HR platform. eLINIA estimates the virtualized platform will save the National Trust more than £10,000 (almost $15,000) a year compared to its equivalent physical infrastructure.
eLINIA technical director Adrian Rapps said that even in desperate economic times, virtualisation continue to make economic and environmental sense. “As businesses look to cut capital expenditure, hosted services that promise to cut energy bills and reduce carbon emissions will replace the more flamboyant green projects of the past few years,” Rapps said in a statement.
Bolstering its cloud efforts, in September 2008, eLINIA launched a cloud-based back-up and storage service aimed at the small and medium-sized business market, incorporating eLINIA’s own encrypted back-up service with Amazon’s S3 technology to provide “a fully managed, massively scalable, storage infrastructure” that lets businesses back up all their local servers and databases, and also products such as Microsoft Exchange.
