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As more and more companies virtualise datacentres, Jenny Williams asks if stepping into a private cloud would really mean greater energy efficiency.

A private cloud tipping point will be reached by the end of 2012. According to Neil MacDonald, vice president and Gartner fellow, more than half of the workloads in datacentres will have been virtualised, providing the foundation for private cloud computing capabilities to cut datacentre costs and increase energy efficiency.

However, TechTargets Data Centre Decisions 2011 survey found 57% of UK and European users are not using or considering using private cloud computing over the next 12 months.

With so many private cloud infrastructure offerings on the market from VMwares vSphere to Microsoft HyperV and System Centre and new products such as Dells pre-packaged private cloud for datacentres, vStart 200 are energy-efficient private cloud datacentres at an industry tipping point, or is it all merely market hype?

Virtualisation is being used to significantly reduce power usage in datacentres. According to Computer Weeklys sister title, SearchVirtualDatacentre, Palmers College in Essex reduced over 20 IBM servers to three in a server virtualisation and datacentre consolidation project.

The datacentre now uses VMware vSphere 4.1 servers and saves 19% of its capital budget by removing disaster recovery (DR) and server replacement costs.

We save roughly another 80% on power compared to what we would be using if our servers were not virtualised, says Dan Byne, IT manager at Palmers College.

Analyst Gartner believes private cloud platforms will further enhance server and storage virtualisation energy efficiencies. Private cloud platforms allow businesses to protect data using an internal, corporate network behind a firewall.

In a report titled Shrinking Data Centers: Your Next Data Center Will Be Smaller Than You Think, Gartner analyst David Cappuccio says private clouds and resource pooling enhance vertical scalability in the datacentre, while at the same time improving the productivity-per-kilowatt ratio.

By 2018, Cappuccio predicts data centres will take up only 40% of the space they occupy today, mainly housing core business services. Sanjay Mirchandani, EMC CIO and

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Can a private cloud drive energy efficiency in datacentres?