KMi IT & Systems Team members Paul Alexander and Damian Dadswell were at Kew Gardens in London yesterday attending the NCE IQ 2008 event. Held on a yearly basis, this event gives members of the IT industry an opportunity to find out about the latest developments in the area of storage, data protection, backup and disaster recovery. This years theme was very much in line with the global green-agenda and the aim was to understand how we in the IT industry could do more to reduce our carbon footprint.

Paul was also invited to speak at the event and presented an overview of how KMi has embraced server consolidation by use of server virtualisation. The presentation featured an overview of how we have changed our IT infrastructure from the days of huge numbers of physical servers doing small amounts of processing. These days we combine a larger number of "virtual machines" onto a single physical system thus reducing the overall power requirement and in-turn our carbon footprint.

One thing that everyone who attended agreed though was that more needed to be done to continue to develop this technology even further!