Union and The Environment

Green Concerns

Everybody is looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint. Whether this is a genuine concern for the environment, a straight forward cost saving exercise, recognition of an energy crisis, or sensible preparation for impending legislation, depends upon who you speak to. Needless to say, corporate responsibility is an important brand ingredient and a metric to be both measured and published.

Balanced Approach

Union has a balanced approach. We genuinely want to achieve all of the above - we care for the environment that our children will inherit; we unashamedly like the cost savings that a well thought out “green” strategy can bring us and our customers – and let’s face it, the market economy we compete in demands it; we recognise that energy consumption cannot continue unabated; and commercially we can’t afford the penalty of non-compliance.

Relevance

We specialise in an area where a significant impact can be made – the datacentre. Gartner anticipates that by the end of this decade energy costs will consume 40% of IT budgets, whilst 75% of this power consumption is attributed to the datacentre.

With servers and data storage being the fastest growing footprints in the data centre this consumption figure is likely to increase, and therefore stemming its growth will be a major contributor to an organisation’s reduction in carbon emissions, and of course costs!

What Is Union Doing?

Quite a lot actually – in fact our entire business model is built upon reducing datacentre footbprint. Plus we operate our business ethically with our own internal environmental stewardship.

  • We continually seek to adapt our customers’ policies and procedures, and to discover new technologies, that drive down capacity consumption and drive out costs.
  • We regularly measure our supplier’s environmental stewardship with our own unique benchmark that we call Greenguage™ (see below).
  • We use only recycled or recyclable consumables.
  • We avoid the production of printed documents. All our quotations, proposals, purchase orders, and marketing materials are produced electronically.
  • We do not take deliveries of equipment – we ensure they are shipped directly from the supplier to you and thus avoid unnecessary transport pollution and congestion.
  • We focus on low impact goods such as software and support and maintenance products. 60% of our revenue comes from such items.
  • We have no IT infrastructure. We use service providers and thus contribute to an aggregated environment that avoids a greater carbon emissions contribution of our own.
  • We provide only diesel fuel cars to our employees and Directors.
  • We actively promote and participate in the government’s Cycle to Work scheme.
  • We endeavour to cluster same-day client appointments in a region or location to avoid unnecessary travel.

Greenguage™

On an annual basis Union carries out its Greenguage evaluation of all suppliers to ensure they meet with our demands for environmental protection.

  • Suppliers’ products meet the needs of our business model in slowing datacentre growth and driving out costs associated with footprint and power consumption.
  • Suppliers have a published and audited environmental policy.
  • Suppliers have a significant research and development investment, and they plan for new generation products that comparatively reduce carbon emissions.
  • Suppliers align their production processes to minimise environmental impact and the use of hazardous materials.
  • Suppliers have a disposals and recycling policy that demonstrates a reduction in incineration and landfill.
  • Suppliers harness the use of, and produce products for the exploitation of, micro-power or sustainable energy sources.
  • Suppliers actively participate in climate change, environmental, and energy conservation bodies.
  • Suppliers demonstrate environmental stewardship of their supply chain through their products’ entire lifecycle.
  • Suppliers have achieved, or are actively in the process of achieving, the ISO 14001 Environmental Management System standard.

Time for Action

Union has a myriad of ways it can help you with reducing footprint, costs, and environmental impact. Here we have highlighted four of our favourites that could give you immediate and substantial returns.

Keep your eye on these technology areas – they’re ones to watch, and ones Union believes will be a standard component of Tomorrow’s Datacentre.

  • De-duplication and Content Addressable Storage (CAS) – slowing storage growth.
  • Virtualisation – improving asset utilisation by enabling aggregation.
  • Massive Array of Inactive Disk (MAID) – significantly reducing the power costs of storing “persistent” data (potentially 75% of your data).
  • Cloud Computing – global aggregation of global computing demands.
If you would like to know more about Union’s own environmental policies or how Union can help you achieve your own objectives please call 08445 611678 or email greenguage@unionsolutions.co.uk.