Future Proof Your Computing Investment -
Building the Case for Green Computing
The Challenge
With electricity prices rising, increased awareness from the public regarding environmental issues and pressure from stakeholders and the government to be more energy efficient, you won't have been able to escape evaluating how your organisation can be more green. The good news is that being green can be a by-product of saving money, increasing ROI and becoming generally more efficient; in other words reducing your carbon output is just one of the competitive advantages of investing in greener processes.
Companies can use technology for everything from making their buildings more energy efficient - think heat and light management - through to more effective fleet management - GPS enabled trucks and smarter back-end systems could help to dramatically cut fuel consumption. It is true, however, there is plenty of low hanging fruit to pick by making a few simple changes, such as getting rid of equipment that is no longer required, or scrapping older kit for newer models that require less maintenance, support, space and power.
Typical methods to help make your organisations' IT greener and improve the efficiency of your infrastructure environment involve approaches such as consolidation, virtualisation, virtual desktop infrastructure and backup. BSG has defined approaches to all of these, detailing the advantages and benefits of each and why you should do this.
Advantages
- Less Physical Infrastructure (Servers, Rack, Power)
- Increased server utilisation from 5% to 80%
- Simplified management
- Adoption of the latest technologies and approaches
- Reduced TCO for your IT environment
Benefits
- Reduction in power and cooling
- Maximising your assets
- Reduced management cost overhead, allowing a business to redeploy staff to concentrate on more proactive tasks
- Aligning IT to meet business requirements
- IT is seen as an asset and not a cost centre
Why BSG
At BSG we believe Green IT is more than just reducing your carbon footprint, we believe it is about improving the efficiency and manageability of your IT environment; from the desktop to the data centre! This is not just about consolidation and virtualisation, it is about using IT to streamline business processes, improve manageability, and in short we believe going green will save you money.
1. ISO 14001
BSG is currently investing in ISO 14001 Quality Assurance and will be fully compliant by July 2008. ISO 14001 is an international standard that specifies a process for controlling and improving a company's environmental performance;
http://emea.bsi-global.com/Environment/Overview/WhatisISO14001.xalter.
2. Tree for a PC
BSG offer a service whereby a customers pay £10 each time they buy a server/ PC, and a tree will be planted within the UK to offset the carbon emissions. Speak to your account manager for more details.
3. BSG Green Data Centre
BSG's Tier IV data centre is the UK's most contemporary design offering 9.99995 SLA's while focusing on minimising its environmental impact.
The two environmental challenges are power used to run and cool IT equipment and the hazards of gases used in fire protection.
BSG's data centre tackles the big issue of power on two fronts. Power used by IT load is delivered at 11kv in to the data halls removing the usual 2-3% loss through long cables and switch gear. Latest UPS equipment reduce loses further by as much as 10-15%. Power used for cooling even using modern chillers and CRAC's is typically 50-60% of the IT load i.e. 1MW of IT load would require 5-600kw of cooling power. We take this figure and reduce it by a further 60% by the introduction of a secondary coil in each CRAC which uses the external ambient temperature to provide free cooling. Despite the global temperatures rising the UK averages below 17 deg 80% of the year, below which partial or full free cooling takes place.
The net effect of these innovations is a power saving of 30-35% over current data centre implementations.
Fire suppression gas in the BSG data centre is replaced by continuous running Nitrogen generators which reduce the level of Oxygen to the point were people can still operate but a flame cannot burn. This makes for a very effective fire protection system and removes the need for gas which harms the environment or water which destroys equipment.
To find out more about how you can achieve greener IT through infrastructure or managed services, or for information about our Green events, click here to contact BSG today.