Every company has a resident eco-warrior: the person who constantly pesters everyone to turn off the lights and use less paper, but makes up for it by bringing in organic vegan wholemeal cupcakes. Here at it’seeze head office, that person is me. I’m also the development director, which means I’m able to unleash my green urges to good effect: reducing our environmental impact, with the nice side-effect of saving money too. This post gives a brief overview of what we’re doing to turn it’seeze green.
Electricity
We’re a web design and development company, and that means a large part of our environmental impact comes from the electricity we use. Here at head office each of our staff has a computer with a couple of monitors, while in a data centre in Manchester a cluster of servers hosts our client websites.
The inside of the data centre
To know where to concentrate energy-saving efforts, we needed to know where electricity was being used. At head office we used an Ecosaver energy monitor to measure each device’s power consumption, while the company that built our servers, Bytemark, helpfully provided us with the figures for their power consumption.
Monitors
While LCD monitors use much less power than the bulky CRT monitors they supplanted, their cold cathode fluorescent backlighting is still inefficient: our previously standard Samsung SyncMaster 205BW monitor – a 20-inch monitor with a 1680×1050 resolution – uses around 44 watts. Monitors with LED backlighting use significantly less energy: our new standard monitor is the Samsung S22C300HS, which despite being larger (21.5 inches with a 1920×1080 resolution) uses only 14 watts. (Note that the photo below shows the LG IPS224V, which has since been discontinued.)
Desktop computers
Our designers use Macs, and for new designers the choice is obvious: the Mac Mini. The original Mac Minis were low-end computers, unsuitable for design work, but the newer Mac Minis are suitable for all but the most high-end uses. The power consumption of a Mac Mini is incredibly low: only 11.4 watts when idle. The desktop set-up below, belonging to our newest designer Steve, consumes a total of only 53.4 watts. Apple’s Mac Mini Environmental Report shows that low energy usage isn’t the Mac Mini’s only green credential.
Steve’s Mac Mini
Servers
One key way of reducing the environmental impact of hosting websites is to host more websites on each server. The limiting factor for most content management systems is the processing power required to generate pages. The it’seeze content management makes extensive use of multiple levels of caching, allowing us to fit huge number of sites onto each server without performance suffering. Our newest web server consumes less than 0.1 watts for each client website.
We can go further though: despite the impressive energy efficiency of the data centre, it’s still using energy from the UK’s national grid, which gets most of its power from burning coal and gas. As a result, we’ve recently started using GreenQloud‘s Storage Qloud service to serve static content, such as the it’seeze logo you can see at the base of all our sites. Storage Qloud works exactly like Amazon’s S3 service (used by Pinterest, Tumblr, and Dropbox), but GreenQloud’s data centre is in Iceland and is powered entirely by renewable energy. The GreenQloud dashboard even gives live statistics on how much energy you’ve saved in comparison with an average data centre, giving your resident eco-warrior another opportunity to feel smug.
The Nesjavellir Geothermal Power Station in Iceland
