Save Something
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.
Power & Footprint Reduction
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!
Measurement
Measurement is key to determining environmental impact. Union never embarks upon any project without measuring both the before and after states of its clients’ infrastructure. We do this as part of our Competitive Edge process and using our Assessment Services. Key performance indicators will include cost, which in turn will be significantly impacted by real estate footprint, power, and the power cost of cooling associated with heat emissions.
Applied Technology
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.
We Do It
We don’t pretend that we set out on a righteous environmental crusade – we didn’t. Everything we do is in the interests of improving service, managing risk, or reducing costs. Rarely are any exclusive to each other and as such we always seek to save money. The power and footprint oriented cost profile of infrastructure, and our customers need to control it, inherently makes or model green. See Union & The Environment to see what Union is personally doing about its own practices to make a positive contribution to the environment.