SNW 08: Marriott goes green to save cash

Going green with corporate tech can save you green - as in money, as Marriott International has found.

Ed Goldman, the vice president of technology and operations planning at Marriott, told attendees of Storage Networking World in Orlando this week that since 2000, his company has focused on using green measures to save money.

Marriott International operates and manages hotels, providing shared services - including IT - to its property-owning partners. "They expect us to deliver Moore's law for them, and see costs go down," he said.

And Marriott has delivered. In the past few years, their IT budget has stayed flat, despite acquiring over a thousand new properties to manage since 2000.

Such cost savings have been the main driver behind Marriott's green campaign, Goldman admitted. "Most of our greening started with cost savings," he explained.

He added: "We're saving that other green, the dollar."

Faced with an aging data centre, deregulation of power driving costs up by two per cent, and the increasing growth of stored data, Marriott knew it needed to do something to keep costs down and improve management.

One way the firm cut costs and energy use was by creating storage pools, moving less frequently used data onto cheaper, slower disks and using tape for backup, as well as improving their archiving. "Concentrating a lot of efforts on those areas saved quite a bit," Goldman said.

Another green, cost-saving move was virtualisation. Moving 40 per cent of the system to virtualised systems saved a third of their servers. "It's a significant cost implication, as well as significant support implication... all of that stuff adds up," he said.

Marriott is also making use of thin client technology, moving as many PCs - especially at front check-in desks - to the less-energy intensive terminals where possible. "We'd like to get rid of PCs in general, but that's never going to happen," he said.

The firm's new data centre itself is environmentally-friendly. Built 150 feet underground in the state of Pennsylvania, it is naturally cooling and almost entirely "lights out" - meaning it requires little human maintenance and therefore just infrequent internal lighting. The lighting that is needed is provided from a system of mirrors which brings daylight underground. Open in August, it will be one of the leading data centres from a tech standpoint too, said Goldman.

Aside from its data centre and infrastructure, Marriott is making other green-friendly moves. Mobile working is encouraged where possible, in order to cut the carbon footprint of people unnecessarily driving into work. And, the company also focuses on recycling as much of its old machines as possible, as well as mobile phones, through third party recyclers.

But Marriott isn't stopping there. Green - in the environmental sense and the financial sense - plans in the future include virtualising as much as 99 per cent of their servers and 80 per cent of their data centre, continuing to use diskless PCs, and increasing utilisation of hardware to 80 per cent.

They also plan to consolidate and centralise systems above individual properties to take better advantage of virtualisation and power, requiring standardisation across their properties.

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