Reducing Carbon Footprint through the Deployment of Remote Workstation Solutions
Authors: Julian Cranwell and Andrew Hayden, IT and Comms Division - hurleypalmerflatt
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Summary
Carbon neutral buildings, environmentally friendly offices; today's businesses are under constant pressure from the Government and their customers to reduce their carbon emissions and ultimately the carbon footprint for their buildings.
15% of the UK's total energy consumption is taken up by office items such as photocopiers, printers, desktop PCs and monitors; this is expected to rise to as much as 30% by the year 2020 according to research by the Carbon Trust.
The more electricity and fuel your organisation uses comes to represent a bottom line cost, therefore logically if you can develop strategies to efficiently use energy and achieve the same results you will in save money on the purchase of less and in turn create less harmful emissions.
The reduction in energy consumption makes good sense when thinking about the environment, many people would argue on the side of greener business equals a greener climate. All very well and said but, although everyone wants to buy into the idea of a green environment the concept sounds expensive, which acts as a deterrent to deploying lower carbon solutions. With the technology available today this does not have to be the case.
Research has proven that efficient use of the correct efficient technology for your business can make substantial CAPEX and OPEX savings.
An example of one such technology is the use of €˜blade workstation' solutions to relocate the workstation active components remotely from the workspace into computer rooms, or data centres, where the power and cooling loads can be dealt with more efficiently.
It is this remote workstation technology, and the carbon footprint benefits thereof that is the subject of this white paper.
Blade hardware has been in the market for some time and has been proven in maximising these benefits, initially for application server purposes.
The theoretical design of a blade unit allows for the removal of hot air to be isolated in a defined area and controlled in efficient way so as to reduce the temperature and return the local environment to a comfortable standard. This control of hot air is often difficult to maintain in an office environment and so with the advent of blade workstations the heat output from an entire office can be isolated into the controlled environment of a computer room or data centre.
Blade workstations are a variant of a standard PC and the technology arrived on the market in 2001. The name describes an end-user PC, such as a desktop or notebook that has all the characteristics of a standalone computer (i.e. PC hardware and software elements). The workstations are mounted within a rack and are controlled remotely by a desktop device connecting screen, mouse, keyboard and other required peripherals.
Before making the conclusion that a blade workstation environment would suit modern business requirements, the causes for a solution should be assessed. Blade technology can apply as a solution to many of today's technologically founded problems, IT costs, space restrictions, downtime and security to mention but a few but in consideration for the environment they can have a substantial saving towards the reduction of carbon emissions.
Variations of this technology include server hosted client computing in virtual set environments. Remote workstation technology works on the same principles as thin clients and VMware solutions. It is similar in that both can be hosted on blade technology but dissimilar on the basis that other solutions utilise a shared server based platform and not dedicated point to point units. The benefits too are much the same as its counterpart but the systems design and architecture holds different challenges.
For the purpose of this article the term remote workstation will refer to multiple independent physical machines housed within a local computer room, or remote data centre environment. Users remotely control their allocated blade via a desktop device which transports data from input/output devices at the workspace. This article therefore will not cover the extensive topic of virtual technologies and remains focused on remote workstations as defined above.
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