When AlburyCity’s Information Management Team proceeded down the path of a sustainability health check of its operations, the first thing that Team Leader Rikk Price found was no fewer than
23 definitions for ‘sustainability’.
Accepting that sustainability is a broad concept, the team narrowed its approach to sustainability using, AlburyCity’s Sustainability Officer, Alastair Buchan’s definition as ‘imagining a brighter future, and working towards it’.
“One issue we became aware of very quickly was the practice of using short term, band-aid solutions at the cheapest possible cost,” Rikk Price said. “We did the minimum to solve a problem to keep us up and running. For example, we added new sections of cabling as it was needed on a piece by piece basis, rather than considering a total upgrade to meet expanding needs and what we ended up with was add on after add on and nothing to build on.”
He said that in undertaking its health check, the Information Management Team talked to all staff about their IT problems and asked them where they wanted to be in ten years time.
The team then prioritised the issues and concluded that web based processes and reliability of systems ranked most highly across the organisation.
“Rather than continuing the practice of add ons, we opted for a convergence of infrastructure and economies, discovering that it was cheaper in the long run to do things thoroughly,” Rikk said. “Another example of opting for a more sustainable system: instead of having
27 different ADSL connections we went to the one large fibre system, providing greater speed and reliability all round.”
He said that the sustainability health check involved a whole of life assessment of hardware and external service providers, including talking to suppliers about sustainable practices and energy saving initiatives.
“We looked at the option of leasing or buying new equipment,” Rikk Price said. “And we took into account issues such as lifespan and not having to recycling equipment when leasing.
“Through our investigations, we found the server room was using a lot of power, and staff said that with the temperature set at 18 degrees, it was often too cold. We discovered that servers can operate at any temperature between 10 and 40 degrees. In response, we installed a smarter air conditioning controller that turns on the air conditioner when the temperature reaches 26 degrees and switches to heating if it falls below 22 degrees.
“We have also reduced our number of servers using virtualisation, where one server can operate as if it is multiple servers. The result of these changes is a dramatic reduction in power consumption and lease costs.
“In the future, our disaster recovery site will be used to test new solutions, avoiding any potentially adverse effects to our current programs.
“We are now looking to the future, and at aggregating the whole network to include phones, our security system and telemetry all together.”
For further information contact Rikk Price on (02) 6023 8111.
