All-in-one mega online betting site, Betfair, is setting the new standard in green IT for companies in the online gaming sector. As reported by PC World earlier in the week, Betfair is making great strides to improve their IT energy efficiency, which Betfair says they are confident they can do by 84%. With growing concerns over global warming and environmental conservation, not to mention concerns regarding rack space for their expanding data centers, Betfair began looking for business benefits, which just so happened to be pointing to "green".

Being such a highly trafficked website (nearly 4 billion page impressions per week), Betfair can process more than 22,000 transactions per second during popular horse races. Betfair's data centers have apparently been pushing the energy envelope, so to speak, and the company decided it was nigh time to begin thinking about long term solutions to their services increasing energy demands.

What they found was something called virtualization technology, which has allowed them to reduce their equipment racks from 40 down to 16, thus equating into an 84% cut in energy usage. Similarly, Betfair has been able to reduce their disk space from 60Tb to 20Tb with storage virtualization, which has amounted to a 60% energy savings than before. And for the icing on the cake, Betfair replaced all of their Intel processors with AMD Opteron chips in seventy of their front-end web servers, thus conserving another 50% of energy usage.

Betfair's Service Quality Director, John Hegarty, said the company's mission to "go green" does not end with green IT technology. As part of their everyday operations in the office, Betfair has formed an internal committee to focus on greening things up. Some of the practices being widely promoted are paper recycling (including printing on both sides when possible) and energy conservation by turning off electronic devices and computers when they are not in use.

n the future, BetFair says they will be making more green IT purchases. In order to encourage supply companies to do the same, Hegarty says they will be handing out the "Betfair Green Supplier of the Year". What all began with a look to saving some money and energy, Betfair is now a champion of the green movement.