Irwin Mitchell, a UK law firm with more than 2,500
employees, expects to save a total of £65,000 a year bydriving down power consumption in its IT
department.
Gary Thomas, head of IT at Irwin Mitchell, said the company is
working towards compliance with the
ISO 14000
standard, which helps firms
reduce the energy consumption of their IT equipment.
The company expects to save £15,000 a year on power costs after
rolling out Verdiem client-server software to automatically switch
PCs off overnight and to switch PCs to a sleep state after being
left idle for 15 minutes.
"We took energy savings further by switching PCs to sleep mode
rather than leaving them running a screen saver in locked mode,"
said Thomas.
Irwin Mitchell ran a two-week pilot project with 20 users to get
feedback in setting the optimal idle time and gaining user
buy-in.
"If we were to switch PCs off after five minutes, users would
get upset, so there is a balance between maximising shut-down time
and saving energy and being practical."
Thomas chose software that did not require the use of Wake on
Lan (WoL) - a network standard that can switch PCs on a local area
network on and off - because not all the 2,500 PCs had a network
interface card that supported the WoL standard.
In a second project, which is expected to save nearly £10,000 a
year in power costs, Irwin Mitchell plans to move its datacentre to
a VMware environment.
Irwin Mitchell has virtualised 50 physical servers of its total
fleet of 250 onto four boxes. It plans to further reduce the
remaining 200 servers but has yet to set a target.
The company predicts savings of £40,000 a year in power costs by
taking a more strategic view on printers. This includes reducing
its printers and moving to a "pull" print environment.
Staff use a swipe card to authorise print jobs at the printer,
unlike a "push" enviroment, where print jobs are sent and not
collected, wasting paper and toner.