Betfair the online betting firm has gone green.  The company have improved its IT energy efficiency to support its rapidly growing data centre.

The company receives over 4 billion page impressions per week on its website and reaches more than 22000 transactions per second for a big horse race.  You can imagine that the power needed to perform such high performance systems places a big demand on energy.

John Hegarty of Betfair said, “We’ve gone down the energy efficiency route very much because we had to.”

“We found that in our data centres we were pushing the boundary of how much power we could take.  We were under pressure on rack space and so we started with a very pragmatic view that focused on business benefit.”

Betfair operates 60 Solaris-based databases which ran on separate servers spread across 40 equipment racks.  However, the company have now achieved an 84 percent reduction in energy saving by using virtualisation technology to reduce it to 16 racks.

Also, storage virtualisation reduced disk space from 60tb down to 20tb, a cut in energy use of 60 percent.

And moving from Intel processors to AMD Opteron chips in 70 front-end web servers has seen in cut in power use of 50 percent as the company has benefited from going green.

John Hegarty said, “I would encourage anyone, even if they’re not considering green IT, to really look at the savings you could make from getting your operations greener.”

Betfair’s green policy doesn’t just stop at the data centre.  They have also installed smart technology that automatically turns off equipment not in use and old PCs are donated to charity for use in developing countries.  Employees have also been encouraged to recycle paper, print less often and use both sides of the paper when they have to print.

Hegarty added, “We have a new established internal committee that focuses on our green programme and the environment in general and it’s over subscribed.  Our staff are fighting to get onto it and they’re really keen to help make a difference.”

Green issues are also likely to be a major factor in IT purchasing decisions explains Hegarty.

“We’re looking to implement a green supplier process where we focus on working with suppliers who have strong green programmes.  Later this year we will be putting out a number of supplier awards and one of those awards will be Betfair’s Green Supplier of The Year.”

On Betfair’s overall green strategy Hegarty explains the policy his company has adopted is of real benefit to the business.

“We make savings so we’re getting a real business benefit.  We find that a focus on these issues really brings our staff together as one team.  It builds commitment and it really supports our culture of innovation.

 “We started off pragmatically going into cost saving through energy efficiency, and we’re coming out the other side with a very strong green programme.”

With the savings that Betfair have made, it is likely other online betting companies will follow suit with their own green strategies.

Print version