Deciding to reduce your company’s carbon footprint is not only good for the environment, it could also help reduce your business overheads and improve efficiency.

A new computer system or a new way of working typically means spending more money. However, by moving to "green" computing, you not only help save the planet but you can also reduce your costs and gain a competitive edge at the same time. The move to a green IT solution can take many different paths, but the most obvious place to start is with your servers and, if you have one, your data centre. Servers are often running all the time, use the most power and are normally under-utilised.

According to Intel, the vast majority of servers use less than 20 percent of CPU capacity on average during the business day, yet they still draw 100 percent power.

The first thing you need to establish is just how much power your business is consuming by conducting an audit. This audit  can identify the processors you have and how much disk space you have available, plus the levels of utilisation for the servers. We can also look at your storage devices, printers, UPS and cooling devices, as they all contribute to your IT running costs.

Once you identify your inefficiencies, you can then start to see what you can do to reduce the worst offenders. The average server uses most of its energy in powering the processor, which uses a similar amount of electricity regardless of whether it’s sitting idle or working at 100 percent capacity. Each stand-alone server has its own power supply, its own diskdrive system, network systems and internal-cooling system – so if you could reduce the processor power and share some of the servers’ core parts, the energy consumption would be reduced immediately.

The answer - possibly Co-Location or Virtualisation?


If Co-Location or Virtualisation isn't for your business then why not consider upgrading your servers?

You can also reduce the total cost of ownership of a server by switching to a new  quad-core or hexa-core processor-based server. These do more work with less power and can be particularly efficient if combined with management systems to reduce power consumption when idling. Moving to a greener infrastructure won’t be achieved by looking at your hardware alone – you also need to examine software and services.

By making a single server do the work of several servers through the use of virtualisation software, you can reduce hardware, energy and management costs. You can also build in disaster recovery by adding data replication and virtualising your storage. This can be used to combine storage capacity into one single device managed from a central point. Just as server virtualisation reduces the number of servers needed, storage virtualisation reduces the number of disks required – increasing the total amount of available disk space for any server on the network.

The move to greener technology is inevitable, but it needn’t add additional costs to your company. In fact, it could save you money in the long term and it should also  help improve your business efficiency.


To find out how BCC IT Solutions can work with you to reduce your carbon footprint without compromising your IT needs, contact us today.