Reed – IT and climate change

Mayday Network

Reed overhauled their entire IT network, replacing old PCs with new  'thin client' terminals.  As well as reducing carbon emissions, the company increased the working flexibility of its employees.

Process

Reed is one of the UK's largest recruitment specialists.  It places people in temporary and permanent positions, offers training and HR consultancy services, and delivers a number of the Government’s Welfare to Work programs. 

Reed’s IT portfolio matches their large size and encompasses 4,500 desktop PCs and over 400 laptops running twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.  Recognising that the network was oversized and inefficient, and wanting to reduce the carbon impact of the system, Reed overhauled their entire IT network. 

To test the new system, Reed entered into a three month trial with 'thin client' terminals provided by Wyse Technology. This trial proved a huge success amongst Reed's employees as it allowed them to securely log-on to access files, regardless of their location, something which was not possible with the old PCs.

Following this success, Reed replaced all PCs with 'thin client' terminals and invested in new blade servers in the data centre. The vast majority of these terminals were replaced over a period of only 10 weeks.  In addition, Reed de-commissioned humidifiers and increased the temperature in the data centres to reduce the need for air conditioning.
 
Throughout the process, Reed communicated the reasons for, and benefits of, these changes to employees to ensure their was buy-in across the organisation.

Impact

  • Within a year of switching to the new 'thin clients', Reed has reduced energy consumption by approximately 5.4 million kWh of power - approximately 2,800 tonnes of CO2 per annum
  • The thin terminal project will equate to a saving of approximately 2,500 tonnes of CO2, by 1st May 2008, and on an ongoing annual basis
  • Where each of the 4,500 PCs were switched on 8,760 hours per annum the new 'thin terminals' only need to be on for 1,748 core working hours - an 80% reduction
  • Reed has halved the number of storage drives and reduced the number of servers by a factor of 20
  • As a result of communicating, employees keenly embraced the changes

See also

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