Tyre and wheel fitment company Tiger Wheel & Tyre (TWT) has recently come of age. IT executive Melody Fourie saw the writing on the wall when she joined the organisation 18 months ago. It was time to go green!
After starting her career with TWT, Fourie naturally took a look around to see what infrastructure she'd inherited. “The server room door was always left open,” she recalls. “The first time I looked inside, I thought, 'Oh dear! What have I done?' There was no brand consciousness; servers of all varieties where racked and stacked all over the place. I looked at the servers we were using to run our core business and found 11-year-old machines that were on life support.”
Fourie went to the board of directors and explained the situation - if any machine went down, it would need replacing and could take between six and eight weeks to come online again. Moreover, any replacement purchases would, by their nature, be grudge purchases.
“The board gave me a mandate to do a data centre refresh,” she says. “I approached IBM and HP, and decided to go with HP, which introduced me to [virtualisation specialist] VMware.”
TWT physically removed the 11 old servers and consolidated them onto one HP C-Class blade chassis with four blade servers, using VMware to create a virtual server environment.
Massive savings
“We would have had to buy 20 physical servers, running at roughly 20% capacity, which would have been a waste,” says Fourie. “And we've added a further eight virtual servers since the initial implementation, at no cost.”
TWT has also been able to switch off one of the air-conditioners in its server room, using one to keep the room at a constant 18^0C, and the other as backup.
Fourie estimates the company's move has saved it the R900 000 it would have had to spend on an additional eight servers, reduced its annual energy spend from R91 000 to approximately R17 000. Its annual cooling and energy usage has dropped from 225 964kW hours to 40 632kW hours - a reduction of 82%.
“By removing our old servers, consolidating and virtualising, we've prevented about 112 tons of CO2 emissions from entering the atmosphere,” says Fourie.
The company is also looking at users who don't switch off their PCs and is considering software to optimise this wastage. TWT is evaluating moving to a virtual desktop environment and would like to replace all monitors in the field with LCD screens at stores.
Bigger picture
I found 11-year-old machines that were on life support.
Melody Fourie, IT executive, TWT
On the compliance side, the company has an e-waste disposal policy in place, and sends waste twice a year to be recycled or disposed of.
“It was a shock to the system when I first looked at this because the guys had been hoarding things in our storerooms. I talked to a company called Global eWaste; they collected all of the waste for us. We did a re-kit in the stores too, so Global eWaste took about 700 kilograms of e-waste away.
“I opted for this company because it doesn't just dispose of the equipment; it re-uses and recycles as far as possible, destroys what cannot be re-used or recycled, and gives us a certificate to that effect.”
Ultimately, says Fourie, this move has allowed TWT to grow its business. As she notes, there's no point going green unless there's a sound business case for it. And in this case, the numbers speak for themselves.
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