15th August 2007

Technology specialist Codestone says it is making a stand for the environment by helping businesses reduce their carbon footprint. The Poole-based firm is doing its bit close to home, reducing IT related carbon emissions by an estimated three quarters. As a VM Ware Enterprise Partner Codestone provides solutions designed to reduce the amount of hardware required, bringing a tangible reduction in energy consumption. “More and more companies are interested in reducing their environmental impact – as well as the reduction in climate change, there are real cost savings”, said Simon Fenech,

He added: “A typical company has 10 servers – we can now reduce that to two or three, each one containing around four virtualised servers with no impact on performance. “Having three machines instead of 10 brings reductions in power consumption, required office space and air conditioning needed to cool them leading, in turn to a reduction in carbon emissions. “It’s a 75 per cent reduction in machines, power and cooling and a big cost saving.” In the past 18 months Codestone has also seen sales of Citrix soar – the technology allows people to work from home reducing time spent commuting and cutting their carbon footprint. A carbon footprint is the measure of human activity resulting in greenhouse gases – namely carbon dioxide – thought to erode the Ozone Layer and contribute to global warming.

Meanwhile Western Digital says its new environmentally friendly GreenPower family of WD desktop, enterprise, CE and external hard drive products. The new GreenPower (GP) family will ship in capacities from 320 gigabytes (GB) to one terabyte (TB), and will save up to 40% in hard drive power consumption, or as much as $10 per drive per year.

Based on extensive customer input toward supporting ENERGY STAR 4.0 compliance and incorporating the latest in engineering technology, WD has delivered the first 3.5-inch hard drive platform designed with power savings as the primary attribute. The GreenPower family gives customers more choices when it comes to purchasing hard drives. The initial drive that will take advantage of WD's new GreenPower technology is the WD Caviar GP. The WD Caviar GP 1 TB hard drive will first ship in July in the My Book range of storage appliances, with 1 TB desktop channel shipments following in August. GreenPower versions of WD RE enterprise drives and WD AV consumer electronics drives will ship in volume within calendar Q3.

ENERGY STAR 4.0 computing systems are designed to enable organizations to minimize their carbon footprint as well as realize significant savings in electricity costs. By WD estimates, in certain applications, the new GreenPower platform can save greater than $10 per drive per year in electricity costs. For example, a data center with 10,000 drives can save $100,000 in annual energy costs, and reduce CO2 emission by 600 metric tons -- the equivalent of taking almost 400 cars off the road for a year.