(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Telecommunications provider Sprint (www.sprint.com) announced on Monday it has cut about $20 million in IT operating costs and lowered its overall carbon footprint by 10,450 metric tons by managing its data center growth.
The achievement was revealed in a newly released Forrester Research case study that documents Sprint’s 11-month internal audit and its findings, says the company.
In the case study, Forrester examines the economic and environmental return on investment achieved through Sprint’s internal audit of IT operations.
The report found that Sprint worked toward lowering its overall carbon emissions and reduced power consumption. Sprint was able to reduce its maintenance and support costs by phasing-out of 127 nonessential applications.
The company also retired or redeployed 2,239 servers. This led to the reclaiming of 291,042GB of storage, eliminating the need to expand storage space or add new servers.
Finally, it avoided building a new data center facility by simply redeploying servers and reclaiming storage.
The company has cut carbon emissions related to powering its data center by 10,450 metric tons, which brings the company one step closer to its 2017 goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent.
“We believe this case study shows that an internal review of business operations can achieve a ‘win-win’ for both the environment and any organization’s IT operations,” says Josh Morton, vice president of IT operations for Sprint. “By turning inward to examine where we could cut costs and improve efficiencies, we increased Sprint’s ability to redirect our IT budget toward strategic initiatives and innovation and away from maintenance and support, while also benefitting the environment.”
Sprint says it plans to continue to expand on its green IT efforts by improving data center power and cooling efficiencies, consolidating its mini-computing labs into one central data center, and continuing to expand its paper waste and e-waste reduction.
The company says it also reuses and recycles the wireless devices it sells, and in order to celebrate Earth Day the company has set a goal to collect 250,000 wireless devices in April.
If successful, the company will see a 25 percent increase over last April’s collection rate.
Additionally, the company has set a goal of reaching a 90 percent collection rate for reuse/recycling compared with annual wireless device sales by 2017.
The full Forrester report on Sprint can be viewed in a PDF file here. Sprint outlines its other environmental programs on its website.
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