Latest news from dancerace

First UK company with IBM i Blades
December 2008

We now serve client companies all over the world from our data centres in Bath. Our investment in this is considerable, and with the amount of computing power required we knew we'd need to consider space, cooling, and energy cost. Another important issue was getting our carbon footprint down so that our clients, who are trying to be green too, can know that their hosted services are provided by a conscientious provider.

During 2008 a joint study involving Dancerace, Real Solutions, and IBM modelled the use of Blade Servers running the IBM i operating System could provide the needs of our power-hungry clients. The solution is exceptionally good, and provides us with expandable capacity to serve almost unlimited numbers of clients in the industry. Using virtual servers and virtual storage sounds odd if you're not technical, but it means there is little waste, and hardware can be set to run well on less energy. And it's easier to fix too.

At the same time we changed to an electricity supplier that gets its power entirely from renewable sources (wind, hydo-electric etc). We built a cooling system that recycles the energy taken from the computer room to heat part of our building. We installed a reserve battery system (UPS: uninterruptible power supply) that keeps us going for about 1.5 hours during a total power cut (after which we switch to our secondary server site across town).

We were the first in the UK to do this sort of thing. See what IBM wrote about us by clicking on the following link (opens in a new window): Dancerace moves to a leading-edge infrastructure with IBM i on BladeCenter