High-street recruitment agencyReedis to complete the replacement of
4,500 HP desktop PCs withthin clientsby the first quarter of
2008 in a move that will save it £200,000 per year in reduced
energy costs.
It forms part of a £2.5 million technology refresh across 300
branches aimed at reducing annual IT spend by 20%, partly through
reducing power consumption.
"We were looking to replace our legacy PCs and servers while
meeting the cost reduction targets set by management," said Sean
Whetstone, head of IT, Reed Managed Services. Reed worked with The
Carbon Company, which helped it identify where energy savings could
be made.
The thin-client system allows Reed to switch of all PC terminals
overnight, using 95% less energy per week, a saving of
approximately 3.8 million kilowatt hours per year.
Whetstone said that Reed had completed 96% of its refresh and
that replacing PCs with thin client terminals from Wyse had reduced
energy consumption per desktop from 185 watts to 17.2 watts. The
total cost of the terminals supplied by Wyse was £600,000.
"The biggest challenge in moving over to a thin client
environment is convincing the business that applications will still
work," said Whetstone. He said Reed had not moved all its
applications to run on thin clients, for example computer-based
training, because of compatibility issues with Citrix.
The company will also replace 500 HP servers in the data centre
with 100 64-bit blade servers using VMware virtualisation to gain
more processing power with less hardware. Whetstone said that
servers were not being used to their full capacity and were
generating significant heat which then needed to be removed through
air-conditioning.