High-street recruitment agencyReedis to complete the replacement of
4,500Hewlett-Packarddesktop PCs with thin
clients by the first quarter of 2008, in a move that will save the
company £200,000 per year in reduced energy costs.
It is part of a £2.5m technology refresh across 300 branches
aimed at reducing annual IT spend by 20%, partly through reducing
power consumption. Reed worked with The Carbon Company to identify
where energy savings could be made.
"We were looking to replace legacy PCs and servers while meeting
the cost reduction targets set by management," said Sean Whetstone,
head of IT for Reed Managed Services.
The thin client system allows Reed to switch off 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 had not moved because of compatibility issues with
Citrix.
Reed will also replace 500 Hewlett-Packard servers in the
datacentre with 100 64-bit blade servers using
VMware virtualisation to gain more processing power with less
hardware. Whetstone said servers were not being used to their full
capacity and were generating significant heat, which then had to be
removed through air-conditioning.