Environmental Sustainability – Cheshire Fire & Rescue cuts ICT carbon emissions by 36 tonnes

Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service responds to emergency incidents in the county of Cheshire. It also provides community safety advice, which reduces risks at home, in the workplace, and out of doors. The Service has implemented a new disaster recovery strategy to help the organisation comply with the Civil Contingencies Act and to safeguard vital data accumulated over 10 years.

The Civil Contingencies Act ensures that emergency services establish proven business continuity plans for all their operations. This is especially critical for IT teams in the National Health Service, the police force, and the fire and rescue service, which must prove they can continue to respond to emergencies even if primary systems fail.

Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service has implemented Microsoft virtualisation and system management technology to achieve better resilience and compliance with the Civil Contingencies Act, as well as an opportunity to reduce hardware and energy costs.

The ICT team at Cheshire Fire and Rescue calculate that by deploying the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system and Hyper-V virtualisation technology, they have also reduced the cost and improved the environmental sustainability of their infrastructure – reducing hardware support costs by 80 per cent, cutting server electricity costs by 77 per cent, and reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 36 tonnes.

You can read more on how Cheshire Fire and Rescue are improving their disaster resilience and reducing their carbon footprint here.

Then, if the Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service experience has whetted your appetite for more information you can download and view whitepapers and podcasts on Microsoft virtualisation and system management technologies here.

Posted by Ian