Scotland's Digital Future: Scottish Public Sector Green ICT Strategy

Automated Power Management

• Software that automatically powers down devices (monitors, hard drives etc.) following dormancy of a pre-specified period. 'Wake-on-LAN' software automatically powers up equipment to install software upgrades at night when electricity costs are cheaper.
• Printers are on average active for just 12 calendar days per year; if not in sleep mode they waste energy 97% of the time.

Re-set power management settings on devices, or purchase/install software if power management settings on devices do not conform to desired standards.

Data Centre Optimisation

The EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres, 2008, describes best practices for efficient operation.

On average almost 40% energy used by data centres is for information storage and retrieval, which is in turn governed by disk speed (faster retrieval speeds demand more energy).

A powered-up but idle server requires at least 50% of the power used when fully operational, therefore a single server running at 80% load uses considerably less energy than 4 servers each running at 20% load.

Examples of best practice include:

• Store infrequently accessed data on slower disks to reduce energy consumption;
• Delete unused data to free up disk space and reduce the number of disks required;
• Back up on tape not disk;
• Move to virtual servers by partitioning servers that run in parallel on the same hardware without any interference;
• When designing new services, use physical or virtual servers before considering the purchase of new servers;
• Configure several 'virtual' servers onto a single server to increase capacity and decreases energy requirements (and also reduce hardware and support costs)
• Further best practice examples can be found at: http://iet.jrc.ec.europa.eu/energyefficiency/sites/energyefficiency/files/files/documents/ICT_CoC/2014_best_practice_guidelines_v5_1_1r.pdf

Remote Meeting and Home Working

Use of tools (audio/video/web conferencing) allowing employees to work without being in the same location, to lower carbon emissions through reduced travel and power consumption in the office.

• Introducing dedicated audio/video conference suites and giving priority or sole use to remote meetings;
• Implementing reward schemes for employees who do not travel to meetings;
• raising the consciousness of staff of the impacts associated with "non-Green" behaviours (e.g. placing messages on travel booking forms about the environmental costs associated with travel to meetings, increasing the awareness of Line Managers when authorising travel expenses etc.).
• Greater use of hot-desking facilities rather than named/allocated desks for individuals so employees do not feel that there is a mandatory requirement to come into work.

Thin Client Computing

Provides users with the same functionality as desktops, but at considerable power savings as there is no local processor (the terminal is attached direct to a server). This results in less heat generation, so:

Reduction in cooling of office space;

Reduced frequency of upgrades as no hard drive or local processing capacity.

• Thin clients have an increased impact on data centres, in terms of increased energy consumption. The trade-offs needs to be assessed according to the individual circumstances of each organisation.