Green ICT Animates at Aardman

This was our first event aiming to tackle the subject of Green ICT. Set in Aardman Animations’ in-house cinema, we heard from Howard Arnault-Ham (Aardman), Jonathan Tapp (Capgemini) and Chris Priest (Bristol University).

Howard explained that their motivation to pursue Green ICT was supported by a strong business case of cost savings and increased resilience.  He also expanded on Aardman’s IT requirements, their current energy saving projects and thoughts for the future:

• Server Virtualisation – They have managed to save 45 tonnes of CO₂ and £10,660 in electricity annually and at least £50,000 on hardware by virtualising their servers. This has also resulted in higher resilience to their system.
• High Density Disk Arrays – High density disk arrays have saved space, reducing the need for cooling, and also improved efficiency. This has amounted to savings of 20 tonnes of CO₂ and monetary savings of £5,433 per year on electricity.
• Audio and video conferencing – They have been using video and audio conferencing tools more often to eliminate some of their travel.
• Future Plans – In the future they plan on exploring the options that will enable more home working (therefore reducing the carbon emissions from commuting), upgrading the internal network bandwidth and look into putting more systems in the virtual space.

Jonathan took us through some of the concepts surrounding Green ICT and emphasised the point that in order to effectively manage your IT energy usage and identify where carbon savings can be made, effective metering and monitoring must be carried out.

• Green ICT vs. Greening ICT – For Capgemini, Greening ICT is defined as making existing infrastructures more sustainable and Green ICT is ICT acquired to enhance sustainability and enable sustainable practice.
• Outsourcing – He touched on the ownership of carbon emissions and scopes, putting it into the context of ICT – would it be better to outsource data storage needs elsewhere, to those who can deal with it more efficiently?  
• Infrastructure Optimisation – He talked about thinking carefully about when to replace older, less efficient hardware to save energy. On-going servicing of existing hardware may add significant amounts of carbon to your footprint, incurred through transportation. It is important to consider both the carbon costs of hardware already in use and the manufacture and shipping costs involved in producing new goods to make a judgement on when to replace existing equipment.

Chris further explored the concept of using ICT as an enabling tool to cut carbon emissions. Some of the main practical applications for organisations included:

• Business Management Systems – Using ICT to control your business management systems and effectively analyse the data reports.
• Creating online services – Doing this removes the need for paper use, travel and can reduce the need for labour (all of which are also harder to calculate carbon costs for than ICT energy costs).
• Online marketing – Again this eliminates a large amount of paper and other materials needing to be produced, distributed and disposed of.

He also proposed some more creative and interesting uses of ICT to cut carbon that could be adapted for many different applications:

• Decision support - Providing information and storing preferences online to generate tailored guidance and better decision making in situations where the users’ actions can have an impact on their carbon usage.
• Augmented Community – Using social media tools to communicate, market and publicise ideas and concepts which can lead to different behaviours and shifts in opinion.

The following Q&A session showed that many of the attendees could see merit in many of these solutions, but that many of these changes would need careful consideration (concerns of reducing person to person interaction, replacing people with ICT solutions, incorrect calculations of carbon life cycles). The ideas discussed during the evening had different value to different organisations and the presentations, particularly the latter, showed that ICT has the potential to provide limitless ways to reduce carbon emissions.

Read more Green ICT tips here.