1. Green ICT
A Media Company Perspective
H Arnault-Ham FBCS, CITP Aardman
Animations 2011

2. Aardmans ICT Infrastructure Green Challenges
Storage.
Large content sizes for each production
• Typical production size on completion is 624 Gigabytes (Shaun the Sheep as an example)
• Typical feature content size on completion is in excess of 24 Terabytes
• Data leakage into Marketing, Rights and Commercials from all productions giving core IT storage hit in
excess of 8 Terabytes
• Archive of company digital asset is now heading towards the 50 Terabyte fully mirrored data
• CGI in-production storage can hit excess of 150 Terabyte during the production process
• Studio in-production storage can hit an excess of 60 Terabyte.
• Email storage is approaching .5 Terabytes
• Networks have to be sized to move all of the above data rapidly either internally of externally.
• FTP capacity is now heading towards the 4 Terabyte mark
So when in full production we can have in excess of .5 Petabyte of disk storage floating about and constantly
draining electricity and cooling systems.
H Arnault-Ham FBCS, CITP Aardman
Animations 2011

3. Aardmans ICT Infrastructure Green Challenges
Servers.
Diverse server requirements to support a business of this type
• Email
• FTP
• Variety of Filer systems
• HR systems
• Finance systems
• Intranet systems
• Extranet systems
• Core database application systems
• Render systems
• Authentication systems
• Security systems
• Digital Pipeline systems
We have over 150 server type systems in place to achieve this and if it is a physical server this will take power
to run the server and power to cool the server
H Arnault-Ham FBCS, CITP Aardman
Animations 2011

4. Aardmans ICT Infrastructure Green Challenges
Network.
We have to move all this data about constantly and at a high speed this
needs a robust infrastructure
• Resilient high speed switch infrastructures at all sites
• High speed inter-site links
• Resilient and fast internet links
H Arnault-Ham FBCS, CITP Aardman
Animations 2011

5. How are we dealing with these challenges currently
Virtualisation of servers and disks
• 30+ virtual servers running on 5 Physical servers
• Virtualised storage reducing storage waste on key systems.
This has the effect of reducing the power and cooling requirements by eliminating 25 physical servers and
reducing wasted disk capacity and hence physical spinning disks, also reducing power and cooling.
H Arnault-Ham FBCS, CITP Aardman
Animations 2011

6. How are we dealing with these challenges currently
Virtualisation of servers and disks
What has this saved?
• 25 virtual servers at approximately 470 Watts per server saves 101520 Kilo-watts per year
• An estimated saving on cooling and de-humidification is a further 40608 Kilo-watts per year
• If we assume that the servers only achieve 50% of this maximum rating over a year we are
effectively saving 71064 Kilo-Watts per year
This equates to 45 Tons of CO2 or, for the bean counters a financial saving of
£10660.00 per year on electricity alone plus a one off saving of at least £50,000
on hardware.
We also had the added spin-off of gaining a highly resilient infrastructure with a
cost effective DR process.
H Arnault-Ham FBCS, CITP Aardman
Animations 2011

7. How are we dealing with these challenges currently
High density disk array’s
From This
To This
H Arnault-Ham FBCS, CITP Aardman
Animations 2011

8. How are we dealing with these challenges currently
High density disk array’s
What has this saved.
• Power saved = 3 Kilo-Watt per hour
• Cooling saved = 1.2 Kilo-Watt per hour
• Saving 4.2 Kilo-Watt per Hour which equals 36288 Kilo-Watts per year
This equates to 20 Tons of CO2 or, for the bean counters a financial saving of
£5433.00 per year on electricity alone
H Arnault-Ham FBCS, CITP Aardman
Animations 2011

9. How are we dealing with these challenges currently
More Video Skype type communication
• Skype towers installed in 3 key meeting rooms
• Skype installed on a large percentage of laptops and desktop systems
• Procuring Laptops with built in webcam
H Arnault-Ham FBCS, CITP Aardman
Animations 2011

10. How are we dealing with these challenges currently
Proactive data centre monitoring
Keeping historical eye on temperature and humidity
• This allows us to set more realistic cooling targets, reducing the power
overheads of over cooling just in case..
H Arnault-Ham FBCS, CITP Aardman
Animations 2011

11. What are our future plans
• Upgrade internal network bandwidth that will act as an enabler to
increase our virtualisation plans
• Put more systems into the virtual space
• Look at processes that will enable more home working, reducing the
commute carbon footprint
• Improve the video conference capabilities to reduce travel to meeting
needs
• Look at paying a small premium to establish greener
infrastructure, tends to be based on more efficient power modules that
produce less heat and as such don’t waste as much energy to produce
the same amount of power as less green supplies. (This is an option of
our Dell procurement page for instance)
• Investigate using intelligent disk systems that can throttle down when
not being used
H Arnault-Ham FBCS, CITP Aardman
Animations 2011

12. Conclusions
• ICT is integral to all business activity so cant be
removed
• Technologies are now available that with some
careful planning will save significant CO2 in your
data centre with the added benefit of also saving
money and adding operational resilience.
• In todays economic climate, your green ICT
initiatives are unlikely to be passed for Green effect
alone, they will also need to demonstrate financial
or competitive benefit to the company if it is to
succeed
H Arnault-Ham FBCS, CITP Aardman
Animations 2011