Computing Awards for Excellence: Green project of the year shortlist

Barclays Capital

Barclays Capital regards environmental impact as a key part of its IT strategy and recognises that technology can be a major contributor to reducing its overall carbon footprint.

In what is one of the largest such projects in the UK financial services sector, the company has begun the rollout of thin-client computers across the business as a way of cutting its power consumption. The strategy will replace PCs in the company with a smaller device that typically runs on less than 10 per cent of the power of a standard desktop PC.

The initial rollout of 4,240 thin-client units will also save the company more than £1.7m in energy costs and reduce its output of carbon dioxide by more than 5,000 tonnes a year.

Inspired by the success of the project, Barclays Wealth and Barclays Global Investors intend to follow Barclays Capital’s example in putting thin clients on employees’ desktops.

BT

BT has implemented its 21st century data centre project as part of a grand plan to reduce the company’s carbon footprint by 80 per cent by 2016.

The project has changed the way in which BT builds and maintains its data centres, and saved the telecoms company £3.8m in electricity costs.

BT has completely revolutionised its cooling setup, engineering a system that uses fresh air instead of refrigeration to cool its computing equipment.

Power is brought into the data centre from the street, but because it had been undergoing several transformations between AC and DC, between 20 and 40 per cent of the total energy taken from the power source was being lost en route. By deciding to run the data centre solely on battery power, which involves only one conversion of power from the street to the data centre, BT engineers have slas hed energy use.

Business Eco Group

Business Eco has deployed a web-based program to reduce its paper consumption.

The company helps organisations to manage their environmental impact and improve their green performance by providing feedback from the public. Its campaigners run focus groups and conduct interviews to elicit people’s opinions. They now collect, submit and view survey data using Crimson Tide’s internet-based MPro Forms.

The system has made large inroads into the company’s paper trail and is currently on track to save almost one million sheets of A4 paper in its first year of use. It also helps the company to monitor the activities of staff and to speed up the interview process.

Business Eco is already considering ways in which planned improvements to MPro Forms, such as GPS and cameras, could benefit its own use of the system.

John Lewis Partnership

John Lewis Partnership has found that commercial benefits can emerge as a result of running an environmentally friendly initiative.

Working with supplier VMware to trial server virtualisation, John Lewis discovered it could achieve a 10 to 1 ratio of virtual to physical servers in the business. Within weeks, John Lewis had virtualised around 60 of its servers, saving £100,000 in purchase costs and £8,000 in power and associated air conditioning over five months.

Resisting the temptation to undertake further migrations immediately, the business stuck to its plan to spend three months after the pilot consulting operational and development teams in preparation for a larger-scale migration.

John Lewis is confident the project has raised awareness of environmental issues across its IT department and has been impressed with the staff response to it.

Peterborough Council

Peterborough Council is prioritising energy efficiency in line with the objectives of the government’s comprehensive spending review and the UK climate change programme.

The council estimated that 30 per cent of its PCs were being left on while not in use, which was costing between £40 and £60 a machine in wasted energy costs. It decided to introduce 1E’s NightWatchman software, which provides automatic centralised power management of PCs across the organisation.

NightWatchman saves and secures work before shutting down applications, reducing energy normally wasted in standby mode. It has saved the council £50,000 a year, and cut CO2 emissions by one metric tonne a year.

“It has been one of our best investment decisions,” says the council’s head of ICT, Nigel Green.

Scottish Borders Council

Scottish Borders Council consolidated a large amount of its older server hardware by implementing a Dell and VMware-based storage area network (San), which also provided an infrastructure for new customer services applications.

The council wanted to avoid wasteful hardware purchases, which would involve high electricity bills and slow disaster recovery. Instead, it introduced a consolidated virtualised system, allowing greater flexibility and smoother operational management.

Two host unit clusters use dual-core Xeon processors, 3TB of San storage and 32GB of memory. A geographically distant mirrored data centre San with replica virtual machines will cover business continuity and disaster recovery.

The improved system has shrunk the council’s electricity bill and is saving an estimated £300,000 in staff time and downtime.