The Operational and Economic Impact of Green IT

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 enables its customers to 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 and operating in more than 40 countries, Symantec had revenues of $6.01 billion in fiscal year 2010.

The company is experiencing steady business growth, both organically and through mergers and acquisitions. In particular, the growing interest in cloud computing and hosted IT services is escalating the demands on Symantec’s data center infrastructure to accommodate those services. Simultaneously, the company is inheriting the real estate holdings of acquired businesses as it continues to manage the impact of its carbon footprint on the environment. Symantec’s software-based approach to green IT offers organizations various tools for streamlining the IT infrastructure and driving energy efficiencies to reduce energy costs. In addition, the company’s longstanding commitment to environmental stewardship is spurring actions on other fronts including facilities consolidation and travel reduction to help Symantec achieve its green objectives.
Barriers
Symantec has endeavored to balance growth in its facilities, application hosting, and data storage services with the mission to contain its global energy consumption. Efforts to find the balance between corporate growth and reducing overall carbon dioxide emissions continue to evolve.
The Solution
Seeking operational efficiencies and lower costs, Symantec implemented a series of steps that leveraged a number of its own data management technologies. The company began consolidating its data centers worldwide to achieve significant savings in facilities and data center operations. The IT infrastructure team harnessed virtualization technologies to manage server growth and related energy consumption. To reduce its data storage footprint the company leveraged Symantec 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 operational and economic benefit. Alchemy Group conducted a TOEI™ analysis and projected IT-related business value totaling more than $19.5 million between July 2007 and December 2012, in addition to $959,000 in facilities energy savings from fiscal year 2008 to fiscal year 2010 (Chart 1).

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