04 Jun 2008
The Department of Work and Pensions’ (DWP) IT upgrade will save £1.5bn by the end of 2010.
Server consolidation and a refresh of all laptops and desktops will be major contributors to the cost savings, which will also deliver annual power savings of 50 GigaWatt hours.
Frank Tudor, director of supplier relationship and performance management at the DWP, said the IT refresh, which began in 2005, became increasingly about saving energy.
“The primary driver was a necessary refresh - the green agenda came in later in the programme, but it has become vital for the organisation,” he said.
The DWP has transferred its entire infrastructure to supplier EDS as part of a managed hosting deal paid for on a per-user per-month basis. This utility model drives energy-efficiency incentives for EDS.
More than 140,000 laptops and desktops have been replaced with more energy-efficient models, 25,000 machines have been scrapped, and 2,500 servers in six datacentres consolidated to 40 servers in two locations.
DWP’s call centre - one of the largest in Europe - has been moved to an IP-based network.
Software from supplier 1E is used to switch off all PCs at evenings and weekends, and a management system is used to put printers into sleep mode.
“We have used sustainability and cost-savings to drive through improvement,” said Tudor.
But organisations should be wary of overplaying the environmental aspects of more efficient IT systems, said Gartner analyst Mark Raskino.
“A tendency to directly equate green IT issues with lean IT will lead to deceptive short-term progress, and we believe it will equally often lead to longer-term pain,” he said.
Energy cost saving is £15 million, not £1.5 billion.
Here's the maths:
50 Gigawatt Hours saving per year. 150 Gigawatt Hours saved until the end of 2010. If you assume a rate of 10 pence per kilowatt hour (I know it's more expensive nowadays..) you get the £15 million figure. One hundredth of the headline amount.
If ther editor response to the previous poster is correct, that other cost savings are present, then the energy saving is only 1% of the total savings. So either a small calculation error made it to the front page without checking by Computing, or there's a massive story in the other cost savings than this story merits. Either way, it doesn't look for the paper...
Posted by: Harvey king 17 Jun 2008
Why is the DWP lending credibility to this story? According to ONS there are 116K people working at DWP. This article claims energy savings in the order of £5100 per person per year between now and the end of 2010.
Since it should cost no more than £300 per year to run a desktop 24x7, (laptops are even cheaper) then each of the alleged 40 servers must each cost in the region of £14M per year in electricity. Sound like mighty big machines.
Either this is a complete fabrication or DWP is being massively overcharged for commodity computing.
It all seems blatant nonsense. And it's on the front page of your magazine!
(Editor's note: The £1.5bn savings are made up of "energy and other costs" - it is not solely down to electricity, as the DWP has kindly clarified to us).
Posted by: John Turner 11 Jun 2008
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