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Kaiser, KPMG, State Street Named Top Firms for Green IT

<p>The top 12 companies for using energy-saving computing at work reads like a how-to for getting the most compute power with the least energy from your IT department.</p>

One of the reasons that green IT is a core focus area for us -- and why IT is central to the VERGE future -- is the broad range and deep impact of the many types of green IT practices.

The annual list of top green IT users from Computerworld magazine, published this morning, reinforces that point, with profiles of 12 firms that have done everything from tried-and-true data center virtualization programs to managing employee travel to creating an entirely new data center energy-management metric.

Kaiser Permanente, KPMG and State Street took the top three spots -- State Street holds on to its third-place ranking from last year, while neither KP nor KPMG made the cut in 2010 -- but across the board, the reasons and projects that landed firms on the list stemmed from widespread engagement with green IT across the organization.

"[Green IT} is so much in people's minds," Madge Meyer, executive vice president at State Street, says in Computerworld's profile. "It's not even one person or one group. It's every person in IT, starting with our CIO, all my colleagues -- everybody. It's in our IT team's DNA."

Kaiser earned the top rank on the list for its comprehensive data center efficiency project, which cut 7.2 million kilowatt-hours from the company's annual power use and saved more than $770,000 from its energy budget.

Part of the savings came from a new data center metric that Kaiser's IT team created. Computerworld's profile says the team "came up with its own way to measure cooling system efficiency, called computer room functional efficiency, passing over industry-standard metrics such as PUE and DCIE, which [Kaiser's Steve Press] says were 'not granular enough.'" Among the solutions:

This included steps such as installing variable-speed fans and hot- and cold-aisle containment systems. "We put to work a lot of little tricks, but the biggest win was sealing up air leaks," [Press] says, noting that these efforts allowed Kaiser to shut off 20 computer-room air conditioners in the three data centers....
"We learned that the first place to address are the cold spots," says Press. "If you take care of places being overcooled, the hot spots take care of themselves." Many of the ideas for power savings came from Kaiser's Keep IT Green teams. The groups of IT staffers, which meet monthly, generated nearly 50 initiatives.

KPMG landed on Computerworld's list in part through its data center virtualization program: After reaching 60 percent virtualization in its server farm, KPMG is saving about $1 million per year in energy and hardware costs.

But KPMG is also using IT to save on its business travel and related greenhouse gas emissions: In 2010 the company launched its Green Travel Advisor program to encourage alternatives to travel, and has saved $2 million a year in travel costs, largely through adoption of telepresence technologies.

For State Street, which has been near the top of the list for the last three years, this year finds a continuation of its ongoing green IT success story. Focusing its efforts on data center storage, State Street used compression and deduplication technologies to reduce its storage needs by 40 to 50 percent; and a shift to a private cloud computing platform has "resulted in a 5-to-1 reduction in hardware."

The full list of top green IT users is below; you can read short profiles of them all at Computerworld's website.

2011 Top Green-IT Users

1. Kaiser Permanente
2. KPMG
3. State Street
4. Allstate Insurance
5. NBC Universal
6. Baker Hughes
7. Northrop Grumman
8. Citigroup
9. Nixon Peabody
10. Raytheon
11. Prudential Financial
12. JM Family Enterprises

Our coverage of past years' awards are online here and here.

Data center photo from Shutterstock.

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