Huge Energy Savings, Emissions Reductions in Symantec's First CSR Report

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CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Symantec yesterday released its first-ever Corporate Social Responsibility report, detailing the ways that the company is addressing the triple bottom of line of economic, environmental and social issues.

Between April 2007 and March 2008, Symantec was able to trim its company-wide energy use by over 300,000 kilowatt-hours per month, resulting in savings of more than $45,000 per month in utility costs.

In addition to IT-centric improvements in its operations, Symantec also unveiled with this report a goal to reduce its overall CO2 emissions by 15 percent at the end of fiscal year 2012. The reductions will start from its baseline 2008 emissions, which the company measured as part of developing its overall green strategy.

The company was able to achieve this result in part by trimming down its overall data center size significantly: it closed one co-located data center in the U.K. down and turned off 1,283 devices in its second-largest facility, in Sunnyvale, Calif., consolidating those machines down to just 352 machines and folding them in to other data center locations.

By closing down its Sunnyvale facility, the report shows that Symantec saved $450,000 a year in maintenance costs, earned about half a million dollars by trading in old IT hardware, will cut back its overall IT operating costs by $2.1 million per year, and dropped its real estate costs significantly in the expensive Bay Area market.

Overall, Symantec used several tried-and-true measures to cut back on its energy use, some of which have been previously featured on GreenerComputing.

In addition to consolidating servers and storage arrays, the company said it introduced power management utilities to power down the estimated 60 percent of employees' machines that were unused on nights and weekends. The resulting savings are estimated at $800,000 a year, or more than 6 million kilowatt-hours.

Many of the steps that Symantec used to achieve these IT savings were previously detailed in its November 2007 Green Data Center research study.

The full Symantec CSR report is available online at http://symantec.com.

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