1E - Green IT
17 September 2009Data centres are the focus of most corporate Green IT strategies. However 40% of energy use is still attributable to desktop PCs, most of which can be turned off at night or when not in use.
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Speaker key
SK Sumir Karayi
CL Candace Labelle
SK: 1E is a software and services business, and what we do is, we help large organisations save a lot of money; we help them save money through green IT, so reducing their energy emissions. NightWatchman came about about ten years ago, so we are pioneers in the green IT space. We were working with a large Swiss bank, and we wrote some technology that switched on machines at night, so that they could be patched and they could be secure. What we found when we could switch them on, was that we didn’t need to keep them on overnight, which is what they were doing with most of their computers, and they could save something like $4 million per year – just by switching off computers at night and over weekends. We looked at why they were not switching off their computers, and we wrote some technology, which is NightWatchman, and over the last ten years we’ve invented and reinvented this technology, such that it’s getting better and better. NightWatchman is an entirely innovative product. Now, of course, there are a lot of other people in this space, and that’s also because we quantified exactly what the savings are like across the United States and the United Kingdom. So, for example, just through NightWatchman, to date we have saved over £200 million of energy. What we are doing now is, we’re looking at the next biggest [?] jump [?], which is 23% of all energy being used by IT, it’s with service, and that includes data centre cooling; that includes all the other costs that are associated with keeping a server running. Now actually, servers, exactly the same as PCs, do useful work some of the time, and are doing nothing useful for a lot of the time. Now, we’ve actually invented a method of calculating this; we have patented it, and what we are doing now is, we are implementing that in two or three organisations, and the results are great. We have very large notable customers; people like AT&T, HSBC; and of course, we have today here with us, Candace, from CSC; and CSC are a fantastic services organisation, and I’m sure Candace will tell us more about it.
CL: NightWatchman is a tool that’s really enabled us, as part of our greening programme, to support our initiatives to reduce energy across the corporation, and has also helped us save a number of dollars – a tremendous amount of money on energy and carbon emissions. The success of the project will be measured in dollars saved, certainly from a corporate perspective, but also as it is being driven through our greening programme, the sustainability matrix will be in the amount of energy saved and in the amount of carbon that is being reduced as part of our corporate emissions [?]. We’ll continue to roll out the NightWatchman tool across our organisation, and we’ll be completing that rollout in the next little while, and of course we’ll be looking into the new innovations that are coming from 1E, and at how they’ll benefit us as well.
SK: I’d really like to mention another one of our clients, Dell [?], who not only bought our solution and implemented it across their own organisation, but they also measured, using real meters across two instrumented buildings, exactly what we have said; and what they found was, they were saving $36 per year, just in terms of switching each computer off at night and weekends. That equated to $1.8 million per year worth of savings across 15,000 computers.
