Case Study: The South African Department of Trade and Industry achieves a 75% reduction in power and cooling and consolidates servers with NetIQ PlateSpin Recon

The South African Department of Trade and Industry - Customer Case Study

The South African Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) needed to reduce data center power use, free up floor space and cut costs by extending server virtualization from a disaster‑recovery pilot to its main production site. With many physical servers running at low average utilization but unpredictable peak loads, the DTI required a way to determine which production servers could be safely virtualized together without risking performance or availability.

Using PlateSpin Recon, the team monitored 23 production servers for just over a month to produce detailed utilization and consolidation scenarios. Recon identified 11 servers suitable for consolidation onto a single virtual host (to be deployed as a two‑node cluster for high availability), enabling an expected 75% reduction in power and cooling, lower hardware acquisition and operational costs, and removal of key single points of failure.

The South African Department of Trade and Industry

Poppy Tshabalala

Chief Information Officer, Department of Trade and Industry