Server rationalisation: Going green with our IT

Despite a lack of blog updates from me, progress has been made on a number of fronts, the most exciting being our server rationalisation project.  With some help from Intel, who saw my video blog, and the sorry state of our server cupboard, we are attempting to make a big dent in our power consumption.

To go to the website and see the video, including Dave’s very informative tour of our server cupboard, click here.

The principles are fairly simple – take a bunch (25 plus in our case) of physical servers, each with their own power requirement, and rationalise them down to a much smaller number of power efficient servers, each running a number of “virtual” servers.  From a user perspective the experience is the same, and all of your existing applications and data are carried across.

So in theory this change has a relatively low impact on the business, but a big reduction in power consumption, hopefully to around 25% of the current figures.

The first stage in the process was to audit all of the servers to get an idea of storage requirements, applications supported and processing capacity, which Dave provided to the guys at Intel.  They have now come back to use with a proposed infrastructure, which will get us down to 4 main servers, and an implementation plan that shows us how to migrate the existing servers to the new model.

We now need to work out who is going to manage the migration, and what support we need from our instrastructure suppliers to make any physical changes.  Oh, and we need to get hold of some lovely shiny new (but very green) servers.

I’m really keen to see some tangible progress on this, as we believe this will have one of the biggest impacts on our energy consumption, but probably not the easiest change to implement.  While this is progressing I want to focus on the quick wins, and that may need some focus from the Armstrong staff to help me roll out.

PitStop Competition Video

A few weeks back I mentioned that I had entered a competition in the hope of getting some expert advice on carbon savings.

The video is now online, and can be seen on http://www.computing.co.uk/pitstop/videoreeves/.  Due to unforeseen circumstances I had not slept the night before, so I look more swampy than normal.

What comes across to me is how excited the panel are about the issue, and their advice was as much about winning hearts and minds as was about practical actions.  Now this video is out I’m going to revisit all of our progress to date to see if we have included all the good advice given.

The Armstrong staff ideas are in

We now have a whole raft of ideas based on comments left on this site by Armstrong staff over the last few weeks, and I have collated them (for ease of viewing) below.  There have been lots of left-field suggestions, but also a lot of common sense.  So common sense in fact I wonder why it has never occurred to us before!

In no particular order, the ideas suggested by the Armstrong team:

• Putting in individual room thermostats to allow occupied rooms to be heated
• Draft proofing the front doors of the office which have a 1cm gap
• Putting timers / revising the timers on the central heating to reduce consumption during off peak hours
• Printing on both sides of copier and inkjet paper as standard (single side on request)
• Sending / receiving efaxes rather than paper faxes
• Electronic invoicing to reduce paper consumption
• Open the windows rather than turning on the air conditioning
• Scheduling project consultants diaries based on distance to client (as well as skill set and availability) to reduce mileage
• Using win-terminals in the back office to reduce power consumption
• Implement web-cams for the account managers to communicate with existing customers
• Install power saving sockets (timed, or switch off all components when master device turned off)
• Unplug phone charges and other power draining devices when not in use
• Install energy efficient bulbs, and or motion sensing light switches
• Install a timer on the air con#
• Install a shower to encourage cycling or running to work rather than driving
• Offset carbon emissions through tree planting schemes
• Install a wind turbine / solar panel on the office roof
• Setup the PC’s to hibernate after hours using specialist software
• Put up signs reminding people to switch off lights, printers, LCD screens etc.

The next step for us is to prioritise the above based on potential impact and ease of implementation, and see if we can tackle some of the really obvious ones quickly!  I hope to report progress on some of these soon, and also to announce the prize for the best suggestion, to be decided at next week’s board meeting.

How to create 1 ton of C02 in a week

We’ve started to track the amount of miles we are covering in various parts of the business, starting with the sales team.  Over a week we wanted to understand how much C02 we are producing through business miles, and also consider the practicalities of the alternatives.

Our sales team passed back details on the miles covered over 5 days (names changed to protect the innocent).   Adding in the average C02 production per car per mile, the results of the weeks business miles are below.

 

So in all we generated almost a metric ton of C02 through our sales miles in a week, and not one of our most active weeks.  If we repeated the same experiment with our 30+ project team members, the results would clearly be proportionately worse.

Considering the alternatives, we need to understand some of the drivers (no pun intended) for using a car in the first place:

1) The need to meet the prospect face to face in order to develop a relationship – particularly when the competition is doing the same

2) Busy diaries mean more than one prospect meeting in a day, potentially in different parts of the country, requiring the convenience of a car

3) The cost of public transport (particularly inter-city during peak hours), adding in taxi’s at either end, can be astronomical

There are alternatives - we have tried web-demos in the past, and when meetings are booked in advance public transport can sometimes work, and be cheaper than booking at the last minute.  The challenge for me is more cultural.  We want to develop a long term relationship with our clients and this means a face to face meeting, particularly at the start of the process.  I’m not sure how many of our prospects would accept a telephone conference or a web demo, but then we don’t generally ask.  We pay a lot of money for our sales leads, and we want to do everything we can to close every potential opportunity.

We need to think about this one.  If we can’t completely take away the car, maybe we could consider the cars we drive (BTW I have a diesel 4×4, probably one of the worst), and perhaps incentivise people to drive cars with lower emissions.  But then I read that hybrid cars produce more C02 as part of the manufacturing process, and smaller city cars would not be appropriate for the amount of motorway miles we do.

Any thoughts?

Power problems with ageing kit

I heard somewhere that older equipment, even a couple of years old, can be significantly more power hungry than the current models.  I thought I would put this to the test in our office.

We have a number of large LCD screens in our meeting rooms that are used for software demonstrations, and these are often left switched on or left on standby, sometimes for days at a time.  One of the screens is around 3 years old, whereas the other are more recent, so these became the subjects for my test.

Using a power meeting I tested both screens on standby and full power to measure the wattage drawn.  The results ate below.

 

I was suprised to see the difference in two seemingly identical machines, with the older screen more than 50% less efficient on standby, and around 30% less efficient when switched on.  Obviously we should be taking care to switch these screens off when not in use, but this also suggests we should prioritise the replacement of older kit non-efficient kit. 

Office power consumption stats

We’ve been measuring our carbon emissions on a number of fronts and have some initial results in.  As we all at Armstrong like spreadsheets and graphs I have presented the results as such below…

First off we have office electricity usage, which we captured using the OWL device attached to the Harpenden office meter, which tells us at any one point in time how many KWh (Kilowatts used in an hour) we are consuming.  I have plotted the average usage over the working day below.

The pattern of usage appears to be in line with what you would expect, but at 6pm when the office is virtually empty I would have expected the power consumption to go right down, as opposed to around 75% of the peak consumption.

After a brief wander round the office, it appears that even with most of the PC’s switched off there is still a huge amount of power being consumed by printing and FAX kit on standby, LCD screens, lights, air conditioning etc. still in operation.   I think we need some more research to understand what contributes the most to our office power consumption.

And now for your ideas!

Come on Armstrong team, let’s be having your ideas on how we can reduce our carbon footprint.  Doesn’t matter how big or small, I’m open to your suggestions….. 

22 kW per hour – is that good?

I’ve now received the energy monitoring device and installed it on our 3 phase (I’m learning all the technical lingo) electricity supply in the office.  To do this I had to identify the 3 wires emerging from the meter and into the consumer unit (fuse box), and clip sensors which somehow pick up the energy being consumed, and send the data to a remote LCD display.

As of 3pm today the display is telling me we are consuming around 22kW of electricity per hour, which equates to 22kg of greenhouse gas per hour.  Now I need to check the electricty bill to make sure I am reading this correctly, and also that the calculation of carbon is as expected.

Suffice to say I have no idea if this is good or bad for a company of this size and type, with this many employees, but at least I can start to benchmark our relative performance as we attempt to reduce.  I will plot the usage over the next few days to see what we are doing hour by hour, and publish in a post early next week.

It’s great to start seeing how much we are currently using, already I’m actually looking forward to seeing how much we can reduce through some of the more basic energy saving techniques.  This afternoon we’ve been playing with the air conditioning in the offices, and managed to reduce the consumption by a couple of kWh, so I think is going to get people thinking….

Next step is to attach the individual power meters to some of our workstations, and to open up to the team here at Armstrong for ideas on reduction.

Getting some free advice!

I recieved an email last week inviting me to take part in a competition, where I would have the opportunity to present my business issue to a panel of experts, and benefit from their advice.  The competition closed that day, so I entered (in 500 words or less) my particular business issue, relating to reduction in carbon emissions.  Worth a punt I thought.

 The next day I received an email saying that my entry was successful!  I would be one of 4 entrants attending a soho studio session on the 1st April, where I would meet expert panel, and my issue and the subsequent advice be recorded.  On the day of filming I outlined my project to the panel, who were able to offer the following advice:

• Focus on equipment and the replacement strategy to ensure you are using the most energy efficient  IT kit
• Look at ways of reducing business travel, such as web demo’s and seminars, and record milage on a project by project basis
• Measure consumption before and after applying energy saving techniques to understand the impacts of small changes
• Engage staff in the exercise and get them excited about making the change

I was then set a specific challenge of creating a web blog recording the results of a 2 week experiment to try out some of the above techniques, and to ask staff to contribute to the blog with their feedback.  I was also given a video camera to make a video diary of our progress.  I may even be up for a prize if I am judged by the panel to have successfully followed the advice.

This has proved a great kick start to my project, and I’m looking forward to trying out some of the recommendations from the expert panel over the coming weeks, as well as including links to the video advice footage and my video diary.

Project kick off

This is the first post of my new blog, and I wanted to outline some of the plans I have for my carbon emissions reduction experiment.

The last few days have been spent researching the topic, mainly through the internet, in order to give me inspiration.  Based on this research, it seems that most carbon reduction initiatives go something along the lines of:

• Monitor your energy usage to understand which activities make the greatest contribution to your carbon footprint
• Use this learning to take action to reduce your energy usage
• Offset your emissions where physical reduction is not possible

I’m going to focus initially on the first two activities – I’m not convinced about offsetting at the moment, it seems to me a way of avoiding the issue, but I’m open to be convinced otherwise.

So my immediate plans are to get the measurement process in place – I have ordered some electricity monitors for the main office power supply (the OWL from 2SaveEnergy) and also individual staff workstations (The Power Watt Meter from Energy Direct), and upgraded our internal finance software (Access Dimensions) to take advantage of the emissions tracking functionality which will become our measure of success.

 

Now I need to find some volunteers in each of the 3 offices to start measuring their individual power consumption….

Other items on my plan include:

• An inventory of aging PC hardware to work out which equipment is least energy efficient
• Looking at the setting on our heating and lighting to understand what controls we have to reduce energy consumption
• Asking the sales team to start monitoring their mileage in relation to each new client project, in order to get an understanding or our current fuel usage

Once we get the measurement process in place I will be opening up the challenge to the staff to identify ways we can reduce our energy consumption, and hopefully stimulate some debate internally around corporate social responsibility.