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

"It is the consolidation program," he said. "We are pulling all this stuff out of faculties and divisions and bringing it in and then finding more and more equipment. Plus their growth, anyway, and we are yet to really hit the virtual growth."

UNSW has already seen a huge growth in its virtualised environment with 30 per cent growth in the server environment and up to 60 per cent growth in the storage environment. In the two and a half years since starting the project UNSW has grown to over 1200 servers, 700 of which are virtual running across Unix, Wintel and Linux environments. On the plus side, virtualisation has enabled UNSW to get its per server unit cost and deployment time down from about $12,000 per physical server with three month end-to-end deployment to $1000 per virtual machine with a two day end-to-end deployment, Nolan said.

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