Borders Council in short list Green IT awards

19 October, 2007

The  Council has 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.

Wanting to avoid wasteful hardware purchases, which would involve high electricity bills and slow disaster recovery, Borders Concil 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.

Competing in the Green IT category is Peterbourough council which  is prioritising energy efficiency in line with the objectives of the government’s comprehensive spending review and the UK climate change programme. Peterborough Council  estimated that 30% of its PCs were left on while not in use, 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, reduces energy normally wasted in standby mode. It has saved the council £50,000/pa , and cut CO2 emissions by one metric tonne a year. “It has been one of our best investment decisions,” says  head  of ICT, Nigel Green.

The other UK green runners
Others nominated are Barclays Capital with 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% of the power of a standard desktop PC. The initial rollout of 4,240 thin-client units also save the company more than £1.7m in energy costs, reducing its output of CO2 by more than 5,000/tpa. Inspired by the projects' success, Barclays Wealth and Barclays Global Investors will follow Barclays Capital’s example in using thin for employees’ desktops.

BT implemented its 21st century data centre project as part of a grand plan to reduce the company’s carbon footprint by 80% by 2016 changing the way in which  BT builds and maintains its data centres, and saving the telecoms company £3.8m in electricity costs. BT has revolutionised its cooling setup, engineering a system that uses fresh air instead of refrigeration to cool computing equipment. Power is brought to the data centre from the street, but  undergoing several transformations between AC and DC, between 20-40% of total energy taken from the power source was lost en route. Running the data centre solely on battery power, involves only one conversion of power from the street to the data centre, so BT engineers have slashed energy use.

Business Eco Group has deployed a web-based program to reduce paper consumption and 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. This system has made large inroads into the company’s paper trail and is currently on track to save almost 1m 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 has found commercial benefits can emerge from running an environmentally friendly initiative. Working with supplier VMware to trial server virtualisation, John Lewis discovered it could achieve a 10:1 ratio of virtual to physical servers in the business. Within weeks, it 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. 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. It is confident the project has raised awareness of environmental issues across its IT department and has been impressed by staff response.

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