Inchcape Shipping Services expects to save £50,000 a
year by reducing its IT hardware by 85% in 200 offices around the
world throughcentralising
applications.
The company - which services vessels belonging to the US Navy
and companies such as Shell, BP and Exxon Mobil - is aiming to
reduce its
carbon footprint by cutting the power consumption of its IT
hardware.
Inchcape is using
Cisco wide-area application services (Waas) to optimise
existing bandwidth by 50% to enable core business applications to
be delivered to branch offices over a wide area network (Wan).
Bryan Phillips, group information director at Inchcape, said
optimisation of bandwith was especially important in
"infrastructurally challenged areas" such as Djibouti and
Tanzania.
He said Waas would improve access to hosted applications and the
company's web-based application for all core business processes for
these remote offices.
Phillips said Inchcape was now able to decommission more than
100 servers, with a typical small office consolidating two or more
servers into a single Cisco router.
He said the company had chosen Cisco Waas for the project
because it also provided a framework for other things such as
unified communications using voice over IP.
The centralisation project is scheduled to be completed by the
end of March 2008 and will be followed by virtualisation of the
company's datacentre by the end of May.
Phillips said the company expected to decommission a further 50
servers in the datacentre through virtualisation, reducing
Inchcape's carbon footprint even further.
"Reduction of power consumption is just a start and we are
looking at an overall strategy to reduce our carbon emissions, but
I think a lot of green IT issues are more effectively dealt with by
suppliers and manufacturers than the end-users," he said.