2011 Green 15 winner: Fairfax County Government
Serving one of the largest counties in the United States, the Fairfax County Government launched several IT projects to save tax dollars and decrease the county's carbon footprint, including a 1E PC power management deployment to automatically shut down 14,000-plus end-user PCs across 55 offices when not in operation.
Fairfax also deployed Nomad Enterprise to deliver operating system upgrades, software deployments, and patches to PCs, servers, and sites without disruption. What's more, the country rolled out a self-service software deployment portal through which users can locate and install software without requiring IT staff to visit their office.
The county has realized $300,000 in savings from its PC power management initiative alone. Further, the county's IT staff can spend more time working on IT duties -- and less time wasting fuel and visiting end-users to tinker with their machines.
2011 Green 15 winner: FedEx
FedEx overhauled its enterprise data center to boost capacity from 50 watts per square foot to 125 watts per square foot -- without downtime -- while embracing sustainable practices.
As part of the construction process, FedEx ensured that nearly 11 percent of the building products were regionally extracted and produced, and that 14 percent of other materials contain recycled content.
The company implemented redundant mechanical and electrical systems to yield a high level of energy efficiency while reducing costs. The data center also now houses two heat exchangers, reaping 7,100 hours of free cooling, complements of Colorado's cool, dry climate.
On the IT side, FedEx moved to a general-purpose computing platform, using commodity x86 servers each with a single 10-gig Ethernet cord for networking. The company worked to converge its server, storage, and network infrastructure, in part by revising applications to use the same database and messaging technology. All in all, FedEx squeezed the computing power of 4,000 servers into just 400 servers.
The 140,000-square-foot facility boasts a PUE of 1.28 and is a candidate for LEED Gold certification. The total project achieved an energy cost saving of 12.8 percent.
2011 Green 15 winner: Fujitsu
Drawing on software from Aperture and homegrown tools internally, Fujitsu's business units in the United Kingdom and Ireland has succeeded in gaining far deeper insight in its data center operations while finding ways to boost overall efficiency and cut costs.
The Fujitsu business units used several tools from Aperture, including Configuration Manager, Infrastructure Process Manager, and Capacity Manager, to enable the data center ops team to scrutinize the current and future usage of data center resources, extracting info such as how much floor area is in user and how many kilowatts each rack is consuming. All that data provides a way for Fujitsu to predict future power consumption and engage in more accurate capacity planning. Further, it enabled a fairer and more realistic model for charging its customers for data center and hosting services, basing charges on actual resource usage instead of the traditional service-fee model based on per square foot.
Moreover, Fujitsu used Aperture data outputs in conjunction with an internally developed tool to determine a superior data center layout and to hone energy efficiency, resulting in cost savings and a carbon footprint reduction of 2,700 metric tons per year.
