Microsoft & Monte Vibiano, Virtualisation and its role in a 360° Green IT vision Virtual Press Room

Deep in the Italian countryside, a wine and olive oil producer is taking an innovative approach to becoming a leaner and greener business.

Monte Vibiano – an award winning winery based in Umbria, Italy – has a serious vision, to become the world’s first carbon neutral farm. Central to this vision is the company’s 360° green initiative, which is transforming how the business operates from the vine to the data centre. This vision transcends the whole business and follows a scientific plan laid out by Professor Franco Cotana, a leading Italian scientist and head of Italy’s National Center for Biomass Research. It is also based on strict European Union and Kyoto Protocol regulations. The winery also involved DNV, a Norwegian company specialized in helping businesses voluntarily reducing their carbon emissions.

No stone has been left unturned and looking around the winery site it’s impossible not to spot the solar panels used to generate electricity, or the specially painted white rooftops reducing the need for air conditioning under the strong Italian sun, or the electric vehicles that staff use to travel around the winery’s vast estate. The staff are even encouraged to walk or cycle to work to reduce CO2 emissions. But it’s behind the doors of the data centre where some of the technological transformation is really evident.

In order to lower energy consumption, Monte Vibiano has recently consolidated the number of servers from four to two, through Virtualisation, shutting down those less efficient and more power-consuming. To complete the consolidation process, the winery has chosen Microsoft's Hypervisor for its great performance. This virtualization process will bring down Monte Vibiano's servers energy consumption from 1,95KwH to 1,2KwH, a 38% reduction. Other advantages have been:

• Reduced CO2 emissions
• Improved backup and disaster recovery
• Increased availability
• Increased testing opportunities of new service by installing them on a new virtual machine instead of physical servers

As the CEO of Monte Vibiano, Lorenzo Fasola Bologna, explains, it’s a small company, but with a big vision: “We at Monte Vibiano are part of a relatively small, family-run business, but have never been shy of bold plans. We've never been afraid of taking on a challenge. The goal I've set for my company with the Green Revolution is also a way to preserve it from what seems the inevitable threat of global warming.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Microsoft currently operates about 450,000 servers, of which 25% are virtualised. In the future, Microsoft has set itself the target of virtualising 50% of its servers. Larry Orecklin, general manager for virtualisation at Microsoft believes that server virtualisation is the key to reducing server power consumption in data centers, whether big or small. “Virtualisation is not limited to the size of a company, only to the size of the vision. In this instance, Monte Vibiano had a huge vision – aiming to be the world’s first carbon neutral farm. Virtualisation has played a role in helping to achieve this goal, but the technology would have equal benefits across any SME or Enterprise.”

According to Orecklin, virtualisation is a basis for sustainable computing in the face of reducing mounting energy demands and costs, which will typically be 50% or more of the total IT budget for a data center.

He continued: “Monte Vibiano demonstrates effectively how being lean and green is good for business and for the environment. Many IT solutions that are helping businesses to reduce costs and implement more-efficient practices are also providing significant environmental benefits, such as driving reductions in energy consumption, reducing travel and CO2 emissions.”

Beyond virtualisation, the winery uses Microsoft throughout its IT operations: including tracking Green KPIs with Business Intelligence and SQL Server, and reducing travel expenses and CO2 costs by adopting Unified Communications. In the future, the winery expects to track olive oil and wine production and quality by using Biztalk with RFID Tags on every tree and vine. This is something that Microsoft has dubbed “Field Intelligence”: by attaching a small RFID Tag to its trees, Field Intelligence will help Monte Vibiano to track field activities on the trees of the farm. It will start with around 100 olive trees and expects:

• Complete traceability of its products, from field activities to bottling
• Reduction and optimization of field activities thanks to the possibility of analyzing data retrieved from the system
• Reduction of carbon emission related to those activities

The final word goes to Fasola Bologna of Monte Vibiano: “We are not the biggest company in the world doing the largest consolidation but our virtualisation efforts are part of what we believe in and show how small companies can drive the greening of IT. I would suggest virtualization to every company, even small ones like ours, since they can have a lot of benefits with a low investment.”

For more information, please contact:

Chris Gibbs
Weber Shandwick
Phone: +44 (0) 207 0670528
E-mail: cgibbs@webershandwick.com

Marta Saez
Weber Shandwick
Phone: +44 (0) 207 067 0524
E-mail: msaez@webershandwick.com

Presentation

• Press Conference Presentation

Case Study

• Monte Vibiano Case Study

Backgrounders

• Energy savings and virtualization
• Microsoft on the Topic: Environmental Sustainability

Executive Biographies

• Larry Orecklin, General Manager Virtualization, Microsoft Corp.
• Lorenzo Fasola Bologna, CEO Monte Vibiano

Media outcome

• What Microsoft plans for its 450,000 servers - Data Centre Dynamics Focus, June 1, 2009
• Red Wine and Green IT - Microsoft & Monte Vibiano 360° Green IT vision