Sony TV : Measuring Green Benefits

One of the biggest challenges for enterprises embarking on green IT
initiatives has been calculating the RoI on fresh investments and the cost
savings achieved over the legacy IT set-up. While very few enterprises and CIOs
have devised methods to calculate the efficiency of green initiatives, others
are still grappling with the concept. Sony TV or Multi Screen Media as it is
known today, embarked on the first green IT initiative in 2007 as a part of its
existing group CSR strategy surrounding the 3Pspeople, planet and profitand
has successfully been able to measure the cost effectiveness of every small or
large initiative rolled out so far.

Over the last 6-8 months Sony has embarked on certain key initiatives under
its green IT plan. Its decision to go in for a hosted data center set-up has
significantly contributed to its larger green agenda of optimizing costs. Today,
Sony TV has hosted all is servers in VSNL data centers in Worli and Chennai.
Earlier, Sonys captive data centers were located at its Malad office. However,
the high level sulphur emissions in the area caused high corrosion forcing the
company to go in for the hosted data center set-up. In addition, Sony decided to
downsize the size of its non-critical data center at its office premises from
300 sq ft to 100 sq ft to reduce the power consumption. Initially, Sony had 22
serversa combination of Dell, Sun Solaris and IBM. It converted all its servers
to Dell to standardize the equipment and consolidated and virtualised the
servers using VMWare. While tying up with VSNL, Sony had took up three rack
spaces at the hosted data center facility, but now with server virtualization it
has managed to consolidate and bring down the number of servers to 6 from 22.
The outsourcing of data center, though not a pure green IT decision in this
case, significantly contributed to savings in manageability costs. According to
Ajay Meher, senior VP, Sony TV, even after leaving out the real estate and power
costs, outsourced data center management has resulted in about 25% cost savings
for the company.

Application consolidation and database consolidation is another area that
Sony has explored as a cost optimization option. It has managed to consolidate
four different versions of Oracle databases into a common Oracle 10G database
platform and created a DR backup measure which together brought about 50% cost
savings over the previous set-up. Apart from this, the company has created a
soft quota on printing for every department and introduced compulsory double
sided printing and book printing to save on paper. Though this initiative may
seem small in stature, it has helped in creating a level of awareness and
reduced paper consumption by 40% since May 2008. In addition, the company has
been communicating with employees to encourage the use of daylight to save
on electricity. Also, air conditioners in the office premises as well as data
center have been fixed at 24 degrees Celsius to optimize cooling costs. All
these measures have resulted in 15-20% reduction in monthly electricity bills.

Going forward, Sony plans to embark on a lot of interesting concepts to
further its green IT strategy.  It is currently conducting POCs for two major
activities. The first one involves the digitization of release orders through a
web-based application for all the advertising and media agencies to save on
energy costs, paper and physical storage. Under the second initiative, it is
exploring e-Invoices which has the potential to save 25,000 pages on a monthly
basis and save Rs 1 mn annually.

Priya Kekre

priyak@cybermedia.co.in