e-Government National Awards 2010 winner: Queen Margaret University

But QMU has not rested on its laurels since. The move was such a success that they decided to build on it and firmly establish environmental ICT within the institution. The work that followed is what led to the university winning an e-Government National Award in the ‘for sustainable, ‘green IT’ or ‘carbon-efficient’ services’ category.

 

“We initiated a number of different projects to look at further enhancement,” comments Fraser Muir, director of information services at QMU. “We have implemented some very economical power down software to manage a small number of remaining PCs, which was incredibly easy to use and gave us a return on investment in probably three months, and that was just on 150 PCs or so.”

 

QMU has also done the same for the thin-client terminals, in that they are powered down automatically and switched on in the morning ready for people to use. “That was something that was really quite new,” says Muir. “There is a lot of software out there to power down PCs but none for thin-clients.”

 

This resulted in a saving of nearly 100000kWh per year, whilst the small number of PCs that remained after deployment of thin-client terminals are only active for 9% of the time, on average.

 

Green ICT has also been encouraged through making the data room infrastructure more efficient. QMU has gradually been increasing the temperature of its data room from 18C to the current 25C and will continue to increase this to at least 27C as older equipment is phased out.

 

“We are finding that manufacturers like HP are making equipment that will run at far higher temperatures than they ever used to, so running things at 27C, or even 30C, is possible,” remarks Muir.

 

There is around a 4% energy saving for each degree increase, which substantially reduces data room energy consumption, he adds.

 

Other ICT projects include remote access, in which staff and students are able to work on a fully-featured desktop from anywhere, meaning they only travel to campus when necessary. QMU has also delivered green ICT through virtulisation, by standardising its platform for all new servers on a virtual environment. This enabled QMU to minimise the costs and environmental impact on purchasing and running essential server equipment, delivering a reduction ratio of 20:1.

 

 

The main benefits to the work QMU has done with green ICT has been cost savings and sustainability, says Muir. “We have a very strong sustainability strategy here, which is very tightly integrated between the estate and ICT, which are very much seen as integral parts of the whole institution. Primarily, it was about saving money and reducing our energy consumption, at a time when energy is expensive.”

 

QMU also took into account the government’s carbon reduction commitment, a scheme to improve energy efficiency in large public and private sector organisations. “We are ahead of the game with this, because we are reducing our carbon outputs already,” comments Muir.

 

There is also the issue of how QMU markets and positions itself with students. “[Students] are very environmentally-savvy,” he remarks. “It is one of the decisions they make to choose which university they want to study at. So we use that as a marketing tool to say, we have thought about this, it is embedded in what we do.”

 

The project also had a few challenges to overcome too, especially when it came to bringing users on board. “My mantra is that technology is easy, but the users are the difficult part,” quips Muir. “When we were introducing the PC and terminal shut down, we had to provide quite detailed explanation to some people. A great deal of work went into explaining how much energy was consumed if all of the 150 PCs were on all day. There was an element of justification involved, particularly with people who perhaps didn’t agree with the environmental considerations that we were trying to fulfil.”

 

Students would also complain about open access terminals not working, when in fact they were just switched off. “They were so used to having the terminals on all the time, but when they were switched off, and they had to press the power button, they didn’t know to do this and they thought the terminal was broken,” says Muir. “So there was a need to explain to people why we were doing this and what the benefits were. We found that once we took the time to explain, most people understood.”

 

The green ICT project was delivered in-house and was informed by the JISC Suste-IT project. WYSE Technology were the chosen suppliers for the hardware and provided technical support in the deployment of the terminal power down module. In addition, Ergo supplied power management software, called Powerman, for the PC shut down. QMU also partners directly with Citrix for the delivery of its server and application virtualisation.

 

This is actually the second year in a row that QMU has been a finalist for the e-Government National Awards. As the university didn’t win last year, Muir says that it was fantastic to be recognised in this year’s awards for the hard work undertaken. “Doing all this to save the institution money is good, but you don’t always get an awful lot of recognition for that, so to be nationally recognised, and not just within this sector – this is for the whole of the public sector – was due recognition for the hard work we had done in making this happen.”