Rising energy costs spur IT leaders into action

The road to green IT is different for every organisation, depending on where it starts from, the targets it sets and motivations of its executives.

Some set out to save money on energy bills, some because their IT infrastructure has reached an impasse, and some with the express intent of living up to a green ethos. The motivation may vary but many organisations find they are travelling in roughly the same direction.

For HSBC, the decision to deploy 1E NightWatchman to manage power on 300,000 PCs was made jointly: by the ICT team aiming to reduce desktop total cost of ownership (TCO), and by the sustainability team so as to live up to the bank’s long-standing environmental commitments.

In 2009, including weekends, the software racked up 9,346,534 PC shutdowns, saving 7,267,865kWh of energy and $1,090,180 (£688,000) in energy costs. Thus over 3,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) was kept from entering the atmosphere.

When the London Borough of Hillingdon contracted IT integrator Fordway to virtualise its IT, the initial motivation was not to be green.

“What first forced us down this path was that we were adding server after server until we couldn’t get any more power into the building,” says Roger Bearpark, assistant head of ICT at Hillingdon. “That led us to consider virtualisation and to accurately measure what we had running and how much power it took. That was the real catalyst that converted us to green IT.”

Hillingdon uses VMware to virtualise servers, running more than 90 per cent (about 200) of its servers on nine physical platforms, including provision for disaster recovery. Compellent is used to virtualise storage, reducing the three-year cost per terabyte by more than 70 per cent. Cisco Energywise is deployed to power down unused equipment, such as PCs, after 6.30pm.

The result has cut power consumption by more than 80 per cent, saving more than £93,000 on the annual energy bill, and reducing IT’s carbon footprint by 20 per cent over 18 months, despite accommodating growth of the organisation.

GoodEnergy, a small power utility that supplies energy to UK customers solely from renewable sources, clearly had a deep green ethos to live up to. Having undergone a period of rapid growth, it chose Dell to replace its multi-vendor infrastructure with a virtualised server room running all its business-critical applications, such as CRM and billing, and a desktop estate of more than 70 laptops.

“We needed solid systems so we could provide good service to our customers and generators. Naturally, we also have a keen eye on cost efficiencies,” says Garry Peagam, GoodEnergy’s finance director. “We looked for a company with which we could have a partnership – rather than simply a supplier/customer relationship. That means a company with a similar outlook to GoodEnergy, particularly when it comes to energy and the environment.”

Queen Margaret’s University used Wyse thin-client desktops in the new university campus building near Edinburgh. The building’s use of natural ventilation meant that energy-efficient thin clients were used because these emit less heat than PCs. In fact, they generate less heat than their human end users. This fact, plus ease of deployment and support, has allowed the university to flood the new building with thin clients providing access to personalised data and applications anywhere on the campus.

In October, National Lottery operator Camelot followed a similar route, replacing 600 PCs with Wyse cloud clients, drastically reducing desktop TCO. The thin clients draw just 6.6W of power – less than a tenth of that consumed by Camelot’s old PCs – and last for up to 10 years.
“Thin-client computing was an obvious direction for us to choose,” says Nigel Proctor, Wintel systems manager at Camelot.