Kermit the Frog isn't the only one that knows it's good to be green. Just about every major U.S. corporation has made a commitment to become greener, especially greening their data centers. Symantec, the $6 billion security software company, has gone one step further and demonstrated that green initiatives, especially in IT, can yield cost savings to the tune of about $46 million a year. In fact, Symantec's corporate responsibility program for 2007 outlines the company's multi-phased approach to becoming green. The program leverages some of the company's products.
Enterpriseleadership.org recently sat down with David Thompson, Symantec's CIO, who has responsibility for the company's green IT program. Thompson oversees a staff of more than 1,300 IT professionals. Here is what he had to say:
We've taken steps to learn from its peer companies and its customers about their green efforts.
EL. Can you describe how you consolidated data centers and what benefits you achieved?
DT. We consolidated a data center in the United Kingdom into one in Tucson, Arizona. We reduced about 15,000 square feet and saved about 150,000 kilowatt hours monthly. We had about a $20,000 savings monthly just in power. Through server consolidation, we went from 1,300 servers to 700 to make better use of those assets. We saw savings of $1.5 million annually just from that server reduction. We had a $3 million annual cost savings in facilities from an IT perspective. All of these cost savings are for one data center.
EL. How many data centers did you consolidate?
DT. We did two data center consolidations. We had five data centers and consolidated down to three main data centers. Our primary data center is in Tucson. We consolidated another data center in Sunnyvale, California.
EL. What has been the cost savings from the two data center consolidations?
DT. The cost savings, including the real estate costs, were $10.1 million annually. It's a significant figure. We were a little surprised after we counted all of the dollars our cost savings added up to. I was proud of the hard work my IT team did.
EL. How long can you go before you build or need more data center space?
DT. We see a horizon of four years and two months before we'll need more data center space. If didn't take some of these steps, we'd have a shorter time horizon. Because we took steps early, we're seeing the savings pile up.
EL. How did you consolidate the servers?
DT. We did two things. As we started the planning stage, we looked at where we would put the entire new infrastructure. We changed some service level agreements (SLA). As we moved a server, we gave the business owner the choice of having a physical server in the new location, and having an SLA that would be six to 10 days to put in a new server. The owner would have to buy the server. If they went the virtual route, they'd get the server in three hours and the cost would be part of the central IT cost. By changing that, we made a good case for everyone to go the virtual route. It allowed us to create a virtual farm in our Tucson data center, where all of our new applications occur. We use VMware for the hypervisor and Symantec for the infrastructure.
EL. Do you have any life cycle management for how long these servers stay on the floor.
DT. We use our Altiris change management, configuration management database, and lifecycle management tools. We have a rotation cycle for our equipment both from an end-user perspective and from our core infrastructure. We give some of the older equipment to our labs. We contract with a company to do the appropriate disposal and recycling of hardware.
EL. Have you gone to service-oriented architecture?
DT. No. We're not in that space in this time. As we develop new applications for customer facing, we'll definitely consider it. Service-oriented architecture isn't one of our key priorities.
EL. Have you done any data consolidation throughout the company?
DT. We reduced the overall utilization of storage across all of our 46 field offices. We now backup all of the data in our field offices using our peer disk technology to duplicate the data. We're seeing data reductions close to 35 percent to 40 percent. We're also seeing savings in storage costs, power costs to keep the storage running, and commodity costs in having to buy tapes.
EL. Have you improved the reliability of the data because of doing this?
DT. Because we have better availability of our data, and have more successful backups, we can more easily recover things for our business units or a field office.
EL. Have you reduced email storage?
DT. Over the past year, we've put in our enterprise vault technology. It allows us to vault individual's email. We put the stored mail on peer storage, which reduces our costs and it also allows us to archive quite a bit of mail on off-line storage. The off-line storage really reduced our costs and power. We can still retrieve the data because it's on tape. This reduction in overall email has helped us reduced our legal discovery time and costs.
EL. Have you done anything to reduce energy consumption with desktops?
DT. We noticed that about 60 percent of users are online 24 hours a day. Using our workstation management tools from Altiris, we pushed green settings to all of the workstations. The power cycle in the machine powers the desktop down to sleep mode in keeping with the desktop user's time zone. This initiative has allowed us to reduce cost savings dramatically by having the machines powered down at night.
EL. Any other energy cost reductions besides the data center?
DT. As part of our productivity initiatives and our green initiatives, we deployed more telepresence around the globe. We wanted to get people off planes. Our 18 conference rooms equipped with a high-end telepresence dataport enable users to have an almost in-person experience in the teleconference. DreamWorks created the rooms, which a third-party concierge service manages. Telepresence has provided us with dramatic gains in productivity. Today, our engineers spend more time designing and working on a technology versus then waiting for and taking flights around the globe. We have some good metrics around this technology with 72 percent utilization. Through 2007 to September 2008, we've seen a $22.6 million savings in travel costs.
EL. How did you arrive at that figure?
DT. We did a year-over-year analysis all of the highest traveled city pairs. We tracked that once we went live with the new telepresence system. We saw the reduction in the city pair travel and calculated the difference year over year based on what those city pair travel costs were. That's how we arrived at the savings.
EL. Did you go to a more efficient UPS in your data center?
DT. As we've added additional space to our data centers, we've put in the newest power conservation technologies from Liebert and others. We've been using directed cooling rack units, which allow us to direct cooling to a specific area. These units have helped us to reduce our power. We have the advantage of buying nuclear power in some regions. We view nuclear power as green. In fact, about 40 percent of the power in our main data center comes from a nuclear source. We realize that some people may not approve of this?
EL. Have you been looking at solar?
DT. We don't have any solar. We've been exploring it. We'd consider it as a source of power and heat for the office space within our data center. We've included solar in one of our designs for our future data centers. Solar wouldn't be realistic for our entire data center.
EL. Are any of your data centers near wind turbines?
DT. A portion of the power in our UK data center comes from the wind turbine in the business park.
EL. What are doing to help your customers to be more green?
DT. We give customers the option of how they want to receive their software -- either as physical media or by downloading. We've seen a higher uptake of the digital content delivery, which is a good thing. We're obviously motivating customers, especially our enterprise customers.
As part of our corporate responsibility program, we took a fresh look at our entire consumer packaging and decided to go with the new, smaller eco-friendly packaging. We reduced the package size by 48 percent and replaced the plastic case with a cardboard wrapper. Our cost savings for this effort is about $4.5 million annually cost for the packaging.
EL. What are your customers telling you about their green efforts?
DT. Many of our customers are going green because of the business advantages for cost reductions. We've been sharing knowledge with many of them. As a company, we're putting more and more green settings in our products, such as power management for desktops. For example, the Altiris end point management tools have agreed settings that we can push to workstations. We've done that internally. We have had dialog with our customers about new requirements they want to see in our software, but they're also telling us how they're reducing costs.
EL. What is Symantec doing in the software as a service area?
DT. We're one of the largest providers of security software as a service. We have our own Symantec protection network. This software as a service allows you to backup your business to Symantec's business infrastructure. We also have a company called MessageLabs, which is the number one mail security vendor. It, too, is a software as a service offering. We also have an auto managed service in our managed security service business where we run customers' security operations centers. Software as a service is a big push for us. We see the industry shifting. With all of our experience, we're trying to be a leader in this area.
EL. What has been the overall business impact of all of these green initiatives?
DT. If you look at costs savings (including those from real estate) over this last fiscal year for all of our initiatives, we appropriated between $46 million to $47 million in savings. We're talking about significant cost savings. These are on-going savings.
EL. Do you have any new green projects you're looking at?
DT. We're continuing to drive consolidation around our infrastructure, decommissioning applications, and focusing on every aspect of our business, including a review of our research and development and our use of assets within research and development. We trying to find ways to be more efficient in that area of our business. It's just not about the backoffice. It's also about the areas where we develop products. You'll see continued savings coming from Symantec. We report on these publicly through our corporate responsibility report. I put that data in the report. I'm proud of what we've been able to do today.
EL. Is IT spearheading most of the green efforts?
DT. It's a joint effort between our government relations group, our legal department, and IT. We joined forces to package it within our corporate responsibility program. IT drives it from a green IT perspective by working with our R&D organization to make sure we have products that enable us in our business, and that can also work for our customers.
EL. Where do the green initiatives rank with the governance process?
DT. Just two weeks ago, the agenda for our CEO's staff meeting asked us to report on our status on the green IT initiatives. All of the managers and I came together and reported to the CEO and his staff on the status. The board of directors reviews the corporate responsibility report. We have much insight from our management team and our board about this topic. They support us because of the cost benefits, but also because of what it can do for the market. Our customers have started to see the value of green IT initiatives. It feels good to be in a position to add IT value to the company.
EL. What advice would you give to other CIOs about carrying out green IT initiatives to gain a business impact?
DT. You need to set a goal, to understand your baseline, and to measure your success. You might not hit your mark, but you should try. We continued to set the bar higher and higher for ourselves. If an IT organization can capture that data, it should feel proud and share it with their management team.
Elizabeth M. Ferrarini - She is a free-lance writer and IT consultant from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.
