Symantec Corporation: The Green Data Center

Executive Summary

Overview
Symantec is a global leader in infrastructure software, providing security, storage, and systems management solutions to help consumers and organizations secure and manage their information-driven world. The company helps customers protect their infrastructure, information, and interactions by delivering software and services that address risks to security, availability, compliance, and performance. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Symantec has operations in more than 40 countries. The company’s software-based approach to Green IT offers organizations various tools for streamlining the IT infrastructure and driving energy efficiencies to reduce energy costs and environmental footprints.

Barriers
To control rising energy costs, Symantec sought to minimize hardware needs and energy use and optimize performance in its data centers and elsewhere. The company looked for ways to improve efficiency in its energy use within the data center, not only to help reduce utility costs, but also to reduce overall carbon dioxide emissions as part of its corporate commitment to environmental responsibility.

The Solution
Seeking environmentally beneficial operational efficiencies and lower costs, Symantec implemented a series of significant steps that leveraged a number of its own data management technologies. The company began consolidating its data centers worldwide to achieve significant energy, IT, and real estate cost savings. The IT infrastructure team harnessed virtualization technologies to manage server growth and related energy consumption. To reduce its data storage footprint and related costs for power and cooling, the company leveraged Veritas NetBackup and NetBackup PureDisk for data deduplication; Symantec Enterprise Vault for single-instance email archiving; and Veritas Storage Foundation and Veritas CommandCentral for optimal storage utilization. In addition, Symantec also deployed a custom power management profile on company PCs to eliminate energy waste from unused devices.

Benefits
As a result of its ongoing Green IT efforts, Symantec is achieving substantial business benefit. The Alchemy Solutions Group conducted a Total Operational and Economic Impact (TOEI™) analysis and quantified realized and projected business value in the following areas between July 2007 and December 2011:

• Remote Site Backup Productivity Gains: $692,743 in hardware and media cost avoidance and $443,328 in labor productivity gains through global remote site backup with Veritas NetBackup PureDisk from July 2007 through December 2011.
• Hardware Maintenance Cost Savings: $12,358,000 in maintenance savings on retired server and storage hardware from August 2007 through December 2010.
• Labor Productivity Gains: $1,341,130 in IT productivity gains related to server and storage reduction from January 2008 through December 2010.
• Energy Cost Avoidance: $2,164,438 in utility cost avoidance through hardware device reduction and corresponding power consumption savings from August 2007 through December 2010.

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, a 67 percent reduction in energy consumption.1 Further, by converting the cost of the kilowatts of electricity avoided to kilograms of carbon emissions, Symantec conservatively estimates a cumulative carbon footprint savings of 15.5
million kilograms of CO2 from 2007 through 2010.

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