BMW is two-thirds of the way through a
three-yeargreen IT programmeto improve the
efficiency of its datacentres and desktop IT systems.
In
a podcast interview with Computer Weekly, Bennie Vorster,
vice-president of the BMW group, said, "We take into account any
renewable energy resources we can use in our datacentres." In
Munich, BMW's datacentres are taking ground water from the city
council to cool the datacentre using a
heat
exchanger. BMW pumps the water from its Munich datacentre back
into the water system at a more manageable temperature, which
Vorster said warms up the mains water coming out of household taps
in winter. He said BMW was also using gas from a waste dump to
generate electricity for its datacentre in South Carolina.
Vorster said BMW had replaced CRT monitors with TFT displays,
which consume less electricity. Datacentre servers were also being
replaced by more efficient models through the company's natural
server replenishment cycle. "We replace servers that are between
three and five years old." The newer models are more energy
efficient and support server consolidation and virtualisation.
He said BMW runs a clear strategic approach in provision of
shared physical IT on an enterprise, regional and local business
level. Specialist skills have been concentrated into dedicated
company locations. He said the shared services datacentres are used
instead of each region running its own datacentre servers, which
leads to server consolidation and lowers energy consumption.