Green IT Roadmap - Lower carbon footprints using technology

Piran Technologies achieves Cisco Foundation Express in UK

2012-02-23T05:05:00.003-08:00

Piran Technologies achieves Cisco Foundation Express in UK

We are also pleased to announce, alongside our award for Cisco Premier Partner we have also gained the Cisco Express Foundation Certification.

This achievement shows the additional resource we have committed to Cisco products and services and additional depth we have added to the systems we design, implement and support from Cisco.

Piran Technologies achieves Cisco Premier Certified Partner in UK

2012-02-23T05:00:00.000-08:00

Piran Technologies achieves Cisco Premier Certified Partner in UK

We are very pleased to announce, for the fourth year running, we have re-certified to become a Cisco Premier Partner in the UK.

For our customers, this shows independent recognition of our skills in designing, implementing and supporting the world's leading security and collaboration systems provided by Cisco and used by the majority of businesses world wide.

From Cisco:

Congratulations to Piran Technologies Ltd for meeting all criteria to become a Cisco Premier Certified Partner in UK.

Piran Technologies Ltd has met all personnel and support requirements for achieving Cisco Premier Certification. Your company has demonstrated that it is qualified to sell, install, and support Cisco solutions in UK.

We value the commitment and expertise that Piran Technologies Ltd has demonstrated and look forward to a continuing successful partnership.

Sincerely,

Cisco Channel Certification Team

CompTIA Green IT Specialists

2012-02-22T08:54:00.000-08:00

CompTIA Green IT Specialists

We are pleased to announce that Piran Technologies is now officially recognised with the CompTIA Green IT certification and has two qualified CompTIA Green IT specialists.

The CompTIA specialism confirms Piran's commitment to promoting sustainable computing systems that increase business productivity and our passion for passing on this knowledge to our customers.

The CompTIA Green IT certification ensures knowledge and skills necessary to implement environmentally sound techniques within an organization's IT infrastructure. The certification enhances existing IT credentials to incorporate emerging technologies that shape the global green IT industry.

The exam covers areas necessary to implement and measure green IT programs and investments, including:

A specialized knowledge of current IT methodologies
The ability to develop, deploy, and calculate true ROI for green IT initiatives
Knowledge of cost-cutting power management and IT virtualization techniques
Proven understanding of environmentally-sound waste disposal
An awareness of global organizations mandating standards and regulations

Green IT certification candidates should have completed CompTIA A+, CompTIA Server+ or other IT credentials in addition to a minimum of 18 months of technical experience.

The Green IT certification is intended for IT professionals who have decision making authority over a company's IT infrastructure or work in implementing green IT initiatives such as an IT manager, data center or facilities / operations manager, IT technician, and system or network administrator.

Power Management to Reduce Carbon

2012-02-22T08:22:00.000-08:00

Power Equals Moneyfor Cornish Company.

Solar, Wind and Wave all providegood clean energy, but sometimes there is no substitute for good old fashionedenergy saving.

Teagle Machinery, based inCornwall, manufacture agricultural machinery for sale in the U.K. andthroughout the world. As a steadily growing business they are always lookingfor increased efficiencies and reducing power consumption is top on the list. MarkLawrence IT Manager of Teagle said “Like many companies, most of our office computersare idle outside normal office hours. Relying on staff to turn them off is a hit and miss approach. We wantedto find a solution that could manage needless power consumption, lower ourenergy costs and reduce our carbon footprint. We talked to Piran Technologies about the problem and the results wereimpressive.”

“Teagle’s requirements areuniversal to every business and are in synergy with our own company ethos.”Said Mark Wright, Managing Director of Cornish company Piran Technologies. “Asan IT consultancy that specialises in lowering carbon costs for our customerswe are only too aware of the environmental and financial impact of today’sbusiness systems.”

Piran Technology installedvirtual servers, reducing the number of physical servers on site. “At the timeTeagle came to us we were trialling several software suites capable ofisolating individual computers and other electrical items and turning them‘off’ remotely during long periods of inactivity, typically outside officehours. These items could then beautomatically restarted when needed in the morning.”

“The great thing about thissoftware, unlike power consumption monitoring products,” added Mark Lawrence fromTeagle “is that it eliminates the need for human intervention. We set the policies for each item and the workstationscan be ‘sympathetically’ shut down to ensure no data is lost. These workstations are then automaticallyre-started in time for when they are required. We control the software and the rules, not the other way round.”

“The tools we are implementingare incredibly sophisticated.” Said Mark from Piran Technologies “For instance,if they sense activity on the p.c. then it won’t be shut down. Instead it will keep checking, if it sensesinactivity for 30 minutes for example it will then save any work and power itoff.”

“Over the initial 4 week trialperiod our company, Teagle, saved a massive 165.2 Kw/h of power.” Confirmed Mark Lawrence. “Overa 12 month period we will save over £1300 and nearly 5 tonnes of carbon on just15 computers. Based on that data we havealready doubled the rollout, I mean why wouldn’t you?”

Piran Technologies are now hopingto take this technology further and are looking at marketing their own brandedenergy management solution. “Companiesneed to use electricity, that’s unavoidable,” added Mark “they just need bettertools to help them manage it.”

Notes for Editors:

About PiranTechnologies

Piran Technologies help businesses become more resource efficient by designing,implementing and supporting computer services that increase productivity,reduce running costs and lower carbon footprints. The company hasinvested in training a highly skilled workforce in some of the leadingtechnologies proved to increase business productivity. Piran Technologies are committed to becomingcarbon and waste neutral as an organisation in 2012. They are currently expanding their portfolioof low carbon strategies and hope to be offering their own branded completeenergy management solution in the near future. The company intends to make all of its achievements public access toensure the benefits are shared with the entire business community.

Contact:

+44 1209 708 609

mark@pirantech.co.uk

http://www.pirantech.co.uk

About TeagleMachinery

Teagle Machinery Ltd, based just outside Truro inCornwall, was formed in 1944 and was initially based around a family farm. Ithas grown steadily over the years from a company selling early post warequipment to West of England farmers, into a modern, professional organisation,but still a family business, which sells machines to the whole of the UK andexports to virtually all major countries of the world. Teagle has a policy of investing in thefuture, both by way of product development and manufacturing resources. Stateof the art technology is used throughout the company.

Contact:

+44 1872 560592

mark.lawrence@teagle.co.uk

http://www.teagle.co.uk

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Photo:

From left to right: Mark Lawrence – IT Manager TeagleMachinery; Mark Wright – Managing Director, Piran Technologies.

Carbon footprint: A competitive advantage?

2012-01-09T09:27:00.000-08:00

There's no doubt that carbon management and environmental sustainability practices are still very much in their infancy and for many small businesses the mention of sustainability conjures up images of 'green wash'. So what part does sustainability play in your business plan? And do you consider it as a competitive advantage?

Many larger organisations already pay tax on the levels of carbon they produce. No doubt, as the government's carbon commitment program is further legislated these taxes will increase. For many organisations, until now, so-called 'green wash' has been nothing more than a feel good smokescreen. A way of implying your commitment to sustainability without having to ACTUALLY prove it. This approach is no longer relevant as the addition of costs through increased taxation and rising fuel prices directly effects profitability in a dramatic way.

When analysing how large businesses react to these issues it is important to understand how carbon footprints are measured and some of the methods larger organisations will employ to reduce their carbon footprints.

Carbon Scope
The current standard for carbon foot printing splits carbon into three separate scopes. More details of these can be found on the carbon trusts website.

Scope 1 - Direct emissions

Direct emissions resulting from activities within the organisation’s control. Includes on-site fuel combustion, manufacturing and process emissions, refrigerant losses and company vehicles.

Scope 2 - Indirect emissions: electricity and heat

Indirect emissions from electricity, heat or steam purchased and used by the organisation.

Scope 3 - Indirect emissions: other
Any other indirect emissions from sources not directly controlled by the organisation.

Generally speaking scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions are relatively easy to calculate as the information required is usually readily available to the business. These can also be relatively easy to reduce with the implementation of sustainable technologies and renewable power sources.

It is Scope 3 that provides the biggest challenge to both calculate and reduce as it takes into account the business supply chain. This is the scope that will have a direct effect on the small businesses that deal directly with larger organisations. As larger businesses have traditionally 'screwed down' the costs associated with the supply chain, so will the inevitably look to turn the screw on the equivalent carbon burden.

Put simply, if you are a low carbon company you have less of a carbon overhead to pass on to the up-chain.

Promoting your carbon footprint

So how can you promote your carbon footprint positively? Well, first of all, you must be clear, committed and open about what you measure and what you don't measure. If your carbon footprint is based on scope 1 and scope 2 tell your customers this.

If you're customers are focused on 'Scope 3' then they will expect you to be. Simply 'pushing' some of your 'Scope 1 and 2' carbon into 'Scope 3' won't fool anyone if you're not declaring it. No one likes to suddenly be hit with a hidden charge, and this is exactly what you could be leaving your customer open to.

So whilst there are certain elements of your business that can be pushed into 'Scope 3' it isn't necessarily is also not good practice unless the 'Scope 3' is fully disclosed.

You can however use this method to reduce costs and your carbon footprint if you look carefully at your 'Scope 3' suppliers.

Example 1: IT outsourcing

If you outsource IT services you can directly reduce scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions through less labour, hardware, travel etc. If your selected supplier also has a low or better still a zero carbon footprint you will also reduce your organisations overall carbon footprint. Their footprint is proportionally passed into yours and so on and so forth. Whilst merely outsourcing will have some positive effects on your footprint, outsourcing to low carbon suppliers, who in turn have good 'Scope 3' credentials will increase your attractiveness upwards throughout the overall supply chain.

Example 2: Cloud Computing

Leaving aside the debate about what is and isn't 'cloud' computing we can still use it to support our goals with regards cost and carbon reduction.

Consider your IT infrastructure as Servers (Hardware) and Services (The functions they perform). Each of these, but mainly the services can be moved from internal platforms to hosted solutions on the internet AKA cloud computing services. It's a common misconception that you have to move ALL of your infrastructure to the cloud and its dependency, this isn't the case. It is more likely that you will be able to move a large proportion, if not all, of your day to day administrative applications, such as email, word processing, spreadsheets etc to a secure cloud based service whilst retaining ERP or Accounting systems in house. It is also worth noting that the availability of superfast broadband is NOT a pre-requisite, and a great many organisations are enjoying the benefits of having their regular 'office' applications 'in the cloud' with their existing broadband connection thus reducing the need for extensive file servers and streamlining their in-house server resources. There are many different cloud services available and each should be considered in isolation for its benefits to your business.

So, its similar to the first example but on a slightly smaller scale you can move IT services to cloud computing platforms to reduce your running costs and scope 1 and scope 2 carbon emissions but you must consider the carbon footprint of the service you undertake in order to calculate and disclose your overall carbon footprint.

Gaining a competitive advantage
So for those of us that are small businesses and not directly impacted by legislation that taxes our carbon emissions we need to consider our place in the 'Scope 3' of larger organisations. If you are clear, committed and communicate your actions, achievements and progress you will gain a competitive advantage over your competition and rank higher in the selection process for larger organisations.

Boosting Green IT Sales Resources

2012-01-03T09:10:00.000-08:00

We'd like to extend a warm welcome to Nigel Barker, who started with Piran Technologies today.

Nigel has several years of technical experience and an excellent understanding of our customers needs. We are confident he will be a welcome addition to our business as we further expand our Green IT services.

Nigel will be working within our sales team to help develop, market and sell Green IT services and introduce energy saving initiatives into our existing and potential customers in the UK. Despite a long background in computer support and systems design Nigel's recent career has seen achieve a masters degree in broadcast journalism, lecturer at University College, Falmouth and a long standing radio DJ with Atlantic FM.

Nigel's welcomed return to the computer industry will inject a wealth of experience into our business and our community as a whole and we're sure his personable nature will enhance our already high level of customer services.

Sustainability Awards 2011 - On stage with Dick Strawbridge

2011-12-12T06:24:00.000-08:00

Highlight of my professional career so far. Accepting the highly commended award for best small business at the Cornwall Sustainability awards 2011. A very inspirational day and looking forward to going for the win again next time!

Really disappointed I shaved my Movember off though!

Cornwall Sustainability Awards 2011

2011-12-10T12:41:00.000-08:00

We're very proud to have picked up our second recognition this year for out Green IT services and using low carbon technology to contribute towards reducing our carbon footprint. At the Cornwall sustainability awards 2011we were highly commended in the best run small business category where the judges recognised our efforts not only to reduce our internal carbon footprint but to turn the technology and knowledge into a service that is also offered to reduce our customers carbon footprints and energy consumption with Green IT.

Not to rest on our laurels, we were inspired by all of the entrants and took away some great ideas to drive our Green IT services further. By 2012 we aim to carbon neutral and waste neutral.

Best Low Carbon Business 2011 - The Hub Awards

2011-11-25T08:26:00.000-08:00

Computer Services Company, Piran Technologies scooped last night's Hub award for "Green Business of the Year 2011" for its innovative environmental monitoring and carbon reduction plan and for turning these gains into a marketable service for the benefit of its customers.

Mark Wright, Managing director said "This award means a great deal to me and to the whole team at Piran Technologies and recognises the hard work we have invested to get to this point. It will help us build our profile as a committed low carbon business and help us develop our products and services like cloud computing, server virtualization and IT energy analysis to support low energy and low carbon IT systems. Our plans to further reduce our environmental impact will gather pace through 2012 when we are targeted to become both carbon and waste neutral. Apart from the key trade secrets, we intend to make all of our achievements public access to ensure the benefits are shared with the business community outside of our existing customer base"

The Hub is an exciting and dynamic network created and run by forward thinking business people in Cornwall to support business leaders of tomorrow.

Offering networking opportunities to like-minded members of the Cornish business community we also provide a valuable link with the established business community.

Since launching in January 2003 the Hub has expanded and now boasts over 700 members from the business community across Cornwall (and Devon), making it the fastest growing business network in the South West.

About Piran Technologies
Piran Technologies help businesses become more resource efficient by designing, implementing and supporting computer services that increase productivity, reduce running costs, lower carbon footprints and increase sustainability. The company has invested in training a highly skilled workforce in some of the leading technologies proved to increase business productivity.

Contact:
+44 1209 708 609
info@pirantech.co.uk
http://www.pirantech.co.uk

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Reducing a data centres carbon footprint

2011-11-21T14:41:00.000-08:00

Overview
Our company, Piran Technologies, has refined its products and services to focus on implementation of technologies to reduce running costs and carbon footprints for organisations.

This blog has been constructed as a reference for any organisations looking to reduce the carbon footprint of their IT systems through implementation of new technologies.

We currently have ten employees who are desk based administrative and professional services employees heavily dependent on IT systems to operate.

We use the usual office productivity software as well as some other services and applications specific to our industry.

Since our inception we have been promoting “green” IT products and services and have been keen to promote sustainability by reducing consumption of natural resources. In order to share some of the knowledge we have gained over the past eight years and give other businesses some insight to the potential of carbon and cost reduction in IT we thought it beneficial to publish the following experiment and document the gains with real data.

Everything we have done hear is scalable from small to large organisations.

Drivers
After reviewing our growth strategy and the current IT trends of consumerization of IT and mobile and cloud computing, we realized the traditional IT support business model needed a radical change to be sustainable.

This led us with the desire the build on our existing skills base by adding products and services that allowed us to extend our reach into new technologies and the impact they would have on our customer base.

We soon realised that each of the services we delivered had common themes. Each of them contributed to;

Ultra High availability of data
Reduced power consumption and carbon footprint
Lower support costs

The resulting project set about using the entire range of products we sell to measure the above three points and prove beyond doubt the claim of the services we deliver.

Objectives

To increase the availability of our management information systems to 99.99% over the next twelve months
Reduce the power consumption of our data centre by 30%

Equipment

It was very important to us that we use the technology in-house that we intended to sell to our customer base. Ethically we believe in thoroughly testing everything we sell to make sure we know the products inside out.

We already keep a log of the downtime so we had a good starting point for the first and third objectives and we invested in some equipment and software to allow us to monitor our power consumption for the entire office building and to monitor separate sections of the building as power cost centres; the main focus being the power consumption of our data centre.

We installed the monitoring hardware well in advance of starting the project to ensure we had sufficient base line data to measure the objectives.

After initial analysis of our server hardware and the services running on them we decided on a list of changes and prioritised them in the order of potential impact on the reduction of power consumption and carbon footprint.

These changes were;

Implement server virtualization and shared high availability storage to consolidate server resources and reduce the amount of hardware we needed to run our systems
Move as many management applications as possible to cloud computing services without impacting the availability of the system
Retro-fit older hardware with solid state hard-drives to increase data access speeds and reduce the mean time to failure and required cooling

Method

Server Virtualization
Before implementing virtualization we implemented a data rationalization project to archive old data files and reduce the amount required storage space. This would also make the implementation easier as there is less data to move. With any implementation project moving data is time consuming and also susceptible to problems so the more we archives the simpler the implementation.

We used Microsoft Server 2008 as our virtual server host environment with a QNAP shared storage device providing adequate storage for our needs and flexible expansion should we need it.

We never expected to see any power gains with this initially, in fact, just the opposite as this was additional hardware designed to replace older hardware over the implementation of the project.

Cloud Computing
We analysed the software services we used to run the business, their priority of service and their availability to operate in the cloud computing arena. With this information we then formulated a migration plan. Migrating to cloud computing would be a project that extended beyond the scope of this project as the more critical services would be dependent on faster, reliable internet connectivity and the ability of some providers to provide cloud based software as a service (SaaS).

For some time we trialled Microsoft Office 365 as we are a Microsoft Online Services Partner and although it provided a flexible approach and elements of what we needed for cloud services we ultimately decided to use Google Apps for Business.

Our reason for selecting Google and becoming a Google reseller was based on the ease of setup of the Google apps cloud services and Google’s commitment to develop low carbon, sustainable data centres, a commodity that we valued and believed will become an important trading point in the future.

Solid State Hard Drives
Solid state hard drives have progressed to a level where they are now an affordable solution for small businesses. We decided to retrofit our old servers with solid state hard drives as initial pre-project test indicated a high saving in power consumption. In addition, there were benefits with longevity of the devices.

There are no moving parts so in theory the mean time to failure was increased
There was less noise pollution
They drastically reduced the need for cooling our data centre

Results

Server Virtualization
We measured the daily consumption of our datacentre in Kw Hours per day. Our starting point before any modifications was 28.7 KwHrs/day for six servers, data switches, routers and our telephone system.

The table below shows the reduction in power consumption over the implementation of key hardware.

Add caption

It’s hard to associate an exact figure to the contribution of power reduction from the server virtualization alone as it’s benefits were combined with the cloud computing services to consolidate and remove older hardware. On analysing the data we estimate the savings from the virtualization platform to be 3 KwHrs/day

Cloud Computing
We migrated to Google’s Gmail and through minimal setup we could instantly access email on our Smartphones, workstations and mobile devices. Nothing new to be fair but there’s something to be said from the simplistic nature of Google’s operation.

For document creation and storage Google Apps provides an online editing tool which is adequate for editing documents through mobile working but not our preferred method for general document creation. For this, we retained our local installations of Microsoft Office 2010 with an added app that allowed us to automatically synch documents with our Google docs.

We altered the way we use document storage by storing the top ten most used documents for each user on Google Docs. This allowed us to quickly collaborate and share documents between team members without the constraints of VPN access back to our head office.

An unforeseen side effect of this was our productivity and collaboration increased instantly and we saw a sharp rise in our ability to produce accurate and informative proposals and strategic documents.

The rest of our documents were archived onto our internal server storage.

This operation allowed us to remove two entire servers from the data centre with a further reduction in power consumption of approximately 3 KwHrs/day.

Solid State Hard Drives
Retro fitting the solid state drives was set to be a bit tricky as all indications pointed to third party drives not being compatible with HP servers. The problem seemed to lie with inaccurate identification of temperature reporting which would cause the server fans to remain constantly on, removing any benefit in power reduction and increasing noise pollution to an unacceptable level.

Initially we tested this on one of the old servers, previously removed and managed to overcome the issue. We then decided to replace one other, older server with a new, more power efficient server with the solid state drives.

For the purposes of illustration we also compared the same server with both traditional and solid state drives. The results below show a significant decrease in power of almost 40 Watts on normal running plus a much faster boot time.

Conclusion

Availability
During the twelve months from October 2010 to September 2011 we recorded a total of 4 hours downtime giving an annual availability of 99.96%. Not quite our objective yet but certainly a massive improvement on the previous year of 99.82%

Power and carbon
Overall we saw a power reduction of 9.5 KwHrs/day which, according to the carbon trust and DEFRA equates to approximately 4.98 tonnes of CO2e

9.5 KwHrs/day equates to a 33% reduction in our overall data centre power, 3% above our objective.

General
There are a couple of ‘spin offs’ from this project that will help us achieve a larger strategic goal of becoming a carbon neutral organisation;

We are in the process of moving our energy supplier to Good Energy who provide 100% renewable power

We are in the process of having a solar PV system installed
We have invested in professional qualifications for our staff in carbon literacy and low carbon IT systems

With Thanks
Many thanks to Andy McKenzie from Low Carbon Futures for his role in helping with this project and special thanks to the team at Partner2Succeed and their resource efficiency collaboration club for the introduction and allowing us a platform to share our ideas and objectives.

Green IT Expo - Westminster, London

2011-11-03T13:54:00.000-07:00

An interesting few days in London at the Green IT Expo discovering some of the innovations being used to help reduce carbon emissions of the IT industry.

It has to be said that some of the local events like clear about carbon were much more beneficial and ensured a sense that Cornwall are one of the innovators in reducing carbon emissions in business.

Carbon management is an emerging sector in its own right and many business leaders, myself included, feel its about doing whats right rather than overcomplicating things with potentially skewed metric analysis.

There is a need for clarity when reporting any environmental statistics and, in the long term, this will become more important as the industry settles and companies need to show their carbon commitment to be considered for contracts. In the mean time there are a lot of steps we can all take to take some emissions away from our computer systems and we shouldn't loose sight of this.

One very simple fact I discovered and will share in its self will take tonnes of our 'carbon bill' so here goes...

"The optimum operational temperature for a data centre (server cabinet) is 26 degrees celcius."

Don't believe me? Google it.

For some reason the de facto seems to be to set the air con to its coolest setting, usually 18 degrees. Any time I've ever asked why, the answer always remains the same, "Thats what our IT guy's recommended". Now I'm not an expert in thermo dynamics but I know at least three of my customers who from this point on are going to save a lot of money and carbon by turning the thermostat up.

Making the jump to low carbon, low cost computing

2011-10-21T13:04:00.000-07:00

For the innovative businesses being "green" is no longer a “nice to have” and has become a necessity. For those who have yet to make the connection there will soon be legislation to levy taxes on businesses carbon footprints.

There are many ways a company can measure corporate contributions to their carbon footprint by measuring, managing and reviewing waste, utilities and other carbon contributors yet IT systems often get overlooked.

One of the most shocking statistics of recent years is the fact that the Global IT industry is a potential rival to air travel when it comes to carbon contributions. A shocking fact when you consider this is the same technology that presents us the ability to collaborate more and travel less.

So why is this?

From personal experience I know resources need to be committed in any size organisation to measure and manage power and carbon consumption and without any legislation this is easy to forget.

The key for us was to make the data collection a simple automated process which we achieved with the help of some products from http://www.currentcost.com/ . Once you put some effort into setting this up you can easily let the device collect data and analyse at your convenience. This is when the fun starts!

The current cost device allows you to breakdown power consumption into nine separate cost centres giving you manageable chunks of data. Our main area of focus was our server cabinet.
We were able to ascertain which servers were the worst contributors and why and we made strategic plans to consolidate hardware and migrate to cloud based services in an attempt to reduce power, costs and carbon. Three months into this exercise and we have been rewarded with tangible cost savings in excess of £500; 2,000 Kg of carbon and intangible gains through reduced cooling, better working practices and more accessible data.

There’s still much more to be done and our strategy is well underway to keep the reductions coming. Be sure to keep your eye on the blog and our web site for further updates.