How ConocoPhillips Reduced its Data Center Footprint by 80%

Scott Duplantis, Global IT Director for server, storage, and data center operations at ConocoPhillips, talks about why his company's strategy to reduce its data center footprint won first place in the InformationWeek IT Excellence Awards infrastructure category.

Duplantis says that ConocoPhillips' IT department was suffering from an unsustainable buying pattern and deployment strategy that was too quick to add more storage and servers. The IT group knew it wanted to start buying smarter and consolidate to more powerful systems, while shifting to new technologies that would free up time for other projects like cloud and hybrid cloud. Due to an untimely economic downturn, they had to do all of this on a tight budget, and refused to cut jobs. Watch the video above to learn how ConocoPhillips was able to save $300K in power and cooling a year, decrease raw storage on the floor by 3.8 PB, and reduce its floor by 80% -- all in about 30 months.