Sustainability Victoria Practices Its Own Preaching
Sustainability Victoria Practices Its Own Preaching
January 23, 2007: Working with IBM BladeCenter servers, Sustainability Victoria says it is slashing 50 percent of its energy use to set a green example and encourage other enterprises to take action.
According to Sustainability Victoria, with computers, printers, faxes, phone systems and servers all humming along, IT is the culprit for up to 75 percent of electricity use in the average office. 60 percent of this total figure can be attributed to the server room alone.
“By reducing the number of servers, using more energy efficient technology and intelligently managing server usage, we expect to reduce our datacentre power consumption by more than 50 percent,” says Geoff Mabbett, chief executive at Sustainability Victoria.
For Sustainability Victoria, works are now in progress to develop their new power friendly datacentre. The plans were established by working with IBM Independent Consultant Michael Herlihy of IQT Systems and Business Partner Southern Cross Computing Services. The datacentre will incorporate IBM BladeCenter blade servers, an IBM System Storage DS4700, storage area network and an IBM tape backup library.
IBM says its BladeCenter servers will be ideal for the new datacentre because they are designed to reduce power consumption in high-density datacentre environments. The blade servers utilise shared power, cooling, networking and storage connections to eliminate duplicated components that waste energy.
It’s a case of leading by example. When Sustainability Victoria made the move to a new office in October 2006, moving and merging IT infrastructure provided the perfect opportunity to update on energy efficiencies while also creating a prototype for environmentally sustainable technological use. One integral aspect of the move included the realisation that there is no need to run servers 24 hours a day – something that has now been incorporated into their new office.
“There’s no point running servers that aren’t being used, particularly outside business hours,” says Mabbett.
Sustainability Victoria says it sat down with a number of vendors in order to establish who could assist in their power efficient vision. Mabbett says they ended up working with IBM because the vendor understood their passion for sustainability and “spoke the same language.”
“IBM’s management tools will allow us to reduce the power consumption of non-critical servers at nights and on weekends,” says Mabbett.