Johnson Matthey consolidates servers and goes green

Precious metals and chemical manufacturer Johnson Matthey is embarking on server consolidation and IT sustainability initiatives to cut costs, raise the company's environmental leadership profile, and prepare for future environmental legislation.

"Consolidation and sustainability go hand in hand because we can reduce our carbon footprint by streamlining production systems," said Stephen Way, IT director for Johnson Matthey's precious metal products division.

The programme will focus on intelligent power management and server consolidation through virtualisation at the company's datacentres in London and Royston.

"We expect to realise £120 a year in power savings for each server that is replaced through virtualisation, which would realise a saving of about £600 a year in a branch office, and that does not include other savings, such as reduced cooling costs," said Way.

Johnson Matthey, which is a member of carbon reduction forums, has yet to quantify the savings it will achieve through virtualisation at its larger Royston datacentre.

"Virtualisation has the added benefit of greater flexibility and improved server management and disaster recovery because it enables the company to switch server operations easily to a remote location if necessary," said Way.

Johnson Matthey is also looking at reducing its carbon footprint by eliminating all its paper-based processes.

Way said in the past there had been some "traditional resistance" moving away from paper audit trails for financial transactions, but at just one business in the group, savings of 50,000 pages a year had been achieved by switching to electronic documents.