UNSW consolidation program to save more than $750,000 in '09

The university has, among other efforts, reduced its servers by 300 (saving $500,000 for 2009), decommissioned 11 computer rooms and saved $250,000 on power and cooling costs since the program commenced in 2007.

"Even these figures now are going to increase," Charles Nolan, an IT consultant at UNSW, said. "At the start of the year these were our planning figures. You would probably find our savings are 25 per cent above those. That is even before we get into our new data centre."

UNSW will move into a new, more sustainable data centre located in the Sydney suburb of Randwick next year. The organisation has spoken with other data centre operators, including Canberra Data Centres (CDC), throughout the planning stages to ensure the new facility becomes as green as possible.

In October, [[artnid: 323037|Nolan told Computerworld the education provider had already consolidated 35 data centres, ranging from single servers to fully-fledged faculty-sized data centres, down to two primary locations and a third back up centre.

Prior to the move to its planned facility, however, it has had to purchase new, higher-density servers and storage. In the last few months it has bought seven new blade chassis and 300 terabytes of storage.