Sustainability

Committed to the environment

At INK Networks, we’re committed to sustainability. We support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDG) and want to play our part in reducing the environmental footprint that IT places on our planet.
We’ve taken measures in our own business that have seen us become the proud recipients of the Planet Mark Certificate – a recognised and respected sustainability certification. The Planet Mark is awarded to businesses that prioritise environmental sustainability, set targets aligned to the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTI) net-zero corporate standard and engage their business to drive positive change.

IT and sustainability

There’s a lot of scope to reduce the environmental impact of IT systems and the offices that house them:
  • Power usage – selecting IT hardware devices that require the least amount of power. For example, laptops use less power than desktops.
  • Materials – equipment that is made from recycled materials, and that can, in turn, be recycled at the end of its useful life.
  • Transportation – lighter, smaller equipment produces less emissions during transportation.
  • Re-marketing – finding organisations that can use equipment that would otherwise be at the end of its life.
  • Virtualisation – replacing multiple physical devices with a virtual system to reduce power consumption.
  • Cloud – virtualisation at scale increases hardware utilisation and efficiency, and reduces the dependence on staff being on company premises
  • Remote working – reducing power and water used in the office, and reducing fuel usage and emissions.
  • Sensors to switch off lights, heating and power when no-one is in the office.
  • Minimising printing and using recycled paper
  • Recycling of all office waste
In 2021, a report published by Aurora Energy Research, found that virtualisation has the potential to reduce computing emissions by up to 55% by 2041.

INK Networks – helping to drive sustainability

At INK Networks, we help our clients make informed decisions and design sustainable IT solutions that save the environment and save them money.

We ‘eat our own cooking’, putting these strategies to work in our own business:
  • 50% of our team work from home, reducing the power needed in our office.
  • Office lights and power are switched off when not required
  • We use ‘end of life’ servers in our dummy/lab environments to educate staff, assist with planning projects and carry out troubleshooting.
  • We work only with vendors who have strong environmental credentials – such as Lenovo and Microsoft, and Apple, who have been carbon neutral since 2020.

From 20 to zero – a customer success story

One of our clients had 20 PCs in their office. Each one was running its own operating system and applications. We moved them to a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), where each PC becomes a virtual instance, and all of them run on a single server. They were able to switch off all 20 PCs, and make significant power savings, whilst increasing their processing capacity.

Virtualisation and sustainability

Many organisations run their business on physical infrastructure - servers, storage, PCs and laptops. These might sit at the company’s own premises, or the servers and storage might be in a data centre. But either way, they require a significant amount of electricity to power them – contributing to the company’s carbon footprint.

Virtualisation is a more efficient way of using servers. Instead of one server running one operating system and application, you create multiple ‘virtual’ systems which can all run on the same hardware at the same time. The operating systems and applications are abstracted from the hardware – with each application appearing to have its own dedicated machine, operating system and libraries. One physical server can be segmented into many smaller parts, meaning it can be used by different users or applications, with resources dynamically allocated as and when they are needed, allowing it to be run at greater capacity efficiency.

Cloud computing – how it
benefits the environment

Cloud computing is an extension of virtualisation – rather than sitting on physical servers at the company’s premises, the virtual systems are run in a cloud datacentre, increasing dramatically the scale of virtualisation and the savings that can be made. Each virtual system is allocated resources when they are needed, with thousands of virtual systems potentially sharing a ‘farm’ of servers.

Cloud computing reduces the carbon footprint per user in four key ways:
  • Dynamic provisioning means that systems do not have to be over-allocated. Applications have instant access to resources as required – with no need to allow ‘room to grow’
  • Servers can be run at higher utilisation – virtual workloads are shared between multiple physical servers, allowing each one to run at higher capacity.
  • More efficient data centre design – the scale of cloud data centres means they can be optimised for power efficiency, and reduced cooling.

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Unit 10, 394 Camden Road
London, N7 0SJ , UK

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