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Home > VDI: How to deliver environmentally sustainable IT |
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By combining the growing interest in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) with Unified Communications (UC) organisations can not only drive down power consumption significantly but create an environment that supports a fundamental shift in working practice. From hot-desking strategies that more than halve the number of devices required to cost effective, secure remote working, organisations now have the opportunity to leverage technology to deliver significant reductions in the carbon footprint – and deliver bottom line value.
Changing focus
All of these decisions, of course, have to balance both cost and environment: however keen an organisation is to publish its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy, the underpinning business focus has to be the bottom line. The good news is that many of the tools and techniques for improving the green status of the IT department will also cut costs significantly.
Virtual approach But server virtualisation is just the start. By adopting the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), organisations have the opportunity to fundamentally transform working practices whilst further reducing power costs. The new thin client devices that are used in a virtual desktop environment use at most 30% of the power of the PCs they replace – and that includes the proportion of server power they require. They are highly recyclable and have a far longer lifespan, reducing the lifetime acquisition and disposal costs.
New model By incorporating the IT and telephony solution into one thin client device, organisations can further reduce power consumption and costs – and significantly reduce the maintenance overhead. Indeed, the VDI model fundamentally transforms the environmental impact of desktop support. Thin client devices can be supported remotely, significantly reducing the carbon emissions associated with sending support staff on site. As a further benefit, this remote management also increases uptime, boosting employee productivity and drastically reducing costs.
How to implement flexible working and reducing devices In this hot-desk environment, users not only gain immediate access to their data, regardless of the location from which it was last accessed, but the UC technology also automatically transfers that user's telephone number to the current extension. This enables employees to work anywhere in the building at any time, fundamentally improving space utilisation and reducing waste. This integrated approach works not only in the office, it also supports far more cost effective home and remote working, with calls automatically re-routed to the most appropriate telephone number. The thin client architecture ensures that critical data is never held on the machine – users can exploit wi-fi or 3G connections to access the corporate servers when out in the field. It also removes the dangers of viruses being imported because, with no local disk, it is impossible to download and store any information or games. And, with all documents automatically stored centrally, organisations can avoid the endemic problem of data loss caused by individuals opting to save their data locally, despite clear corporate policies to the contrary. UC also supports the adoption of cross departmental teams using video conferencing to remove the need to travel to meetings – by road, rail or air. By reducing overall employee travel time, organisations can not only drive down the level of carbon emissions but also boost productivity and support strategies for improving employee work/life balance.
Conclusion Critically, with the right approach, sustainable business is not just about meeting targets and being seen to be green but actually adopting efficient, well managed processes that deliver quantifiable benefit to the bottom line. Chris de Silva is the Managing Director of integrator NEC Philips Unified Solutions and a contributor to SearchVirtualDataCentre.co.uk.
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