Green IT Efforts Save Symantec $2.1M in Energy Costs

September 2, 2009

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Symantec Corp., an infrastructure software provider, is achieving significant business cost and productivity benefits including a projected energy cost savings of $2.1 million thanks to its ongoing “green” IT efforts. The cost savings is attributed to hardware device reduction and related power consumption savings from August 2007 to December 2010.

Symantec hired Alchemy Solutions Group to perform an Operational and Economic Impact (T.O.E.I.) analysis on its Green IT efforts from July 2007 to December 2011. The analysis indicates that Symantec stands to achieve significant productivity gains in the area of remote site backup and IT labor as well as a cost savings for hardware maintenance.

As an example, the analysis projects a $12.4 million savings in maintenance costs (Aug. 2007 to Dec. 2010) and $1.3 million in IT productivity gains (Jan. 2008 to Dec. 2010), based on server and storage hardware reductions.

Symantec implemented a series of initiatives that leveraged a number of its own data management technologies to achieve these operational efficiencies and lower costs. The company also consolidated its data centers worldwide, which resulted in energy, IT, and real estate cost savings.

As an example, the decommissioning of hardware from a major data center closure reduced Symantec’s overall device power utilization from approximately 500 kilowatt hours (kWh) to 168 kWh, for a 67 percent reduction in energy consumption. By converting the cost of the kilowatts of electricity avoided to kilograms of carbon emissions, Symantec estimates a cumulative carbon footprint savings of 15.5 million kilograms of CO2 from 2007 through 2010.

In addition, the IT infrastructure team implemented virtualization technologies to manage server growth and related energy consumption, and leveraged several technologies such Veritas Storage Foundation and Veritas CommandCentral to reduce its data storage footprint and related costs for power and cooling.

Symantec also expects significant annual cost savings of $800,000 and more than 6 million kWh of energy per year by deploying an automated power management program that places company laptops and desktops in standby mode after four hours of inactivity.

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