Logicalis

IP network gives Hillingdon the building blocks for a carbon neutral future

The Client

Accustomed as they are to 24/7 on-demand services from private-sector organisations, citizens now expect the same from Government, and, many local authorities are now making their services just as effective. Situated on the outskirts of West London and serving a population of around 250,000, the London Borough of Hillingdon is one such organisation. Employing some 3,000 people, it is the capital’s second largest local authority by area and home to Heathrow Airport.

The Challenge

Like all borough councils, Hillingdon expects to improve its services to the community, whilst at the same time reducing costs and improving its ‘green’ credentials. In its drive to provide better value, it therefore works to show a tangible return on any investment in technology and constantly maximise the use of its existing infrastructure. Ever-diminishing budgets mean it must also exploit every opportunity to reduce its energy consumption.

“With so many targets to meet, not to mention the constant squeeze on budgets, our aim is to contain operational costs and improve our longer-term efficiency, rather than simply making short-term gains,” says CIO Steve Palmer. “Our network infrastructure has a vital role to play - not only in enabling us to develop innovative services for our taxpaying citizens, but also in helping us streamline our internal processes to save costs and reduce our carbon footprint,” says Palmer.

“As in many organisations, our power usage, for instance, has traditionally been poorly controlled - lighting, heating and computers have been left to consume energy 24/7. Not only does this waste money on energy bills, but we are now mandated to meet CO² emission targets as part of our Carbon Reduction Commitment (recently renamed the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme), introduced by the Government in 2007 - otherwise, we stand to pay financial penalties we can ill afford.”

The Solution

Over the years, Hillingdon has positioned itself strongly to implement new and innovative solutions through investment in a highly stable infrastructure based on Cisco’s Borderless Network Architecture, as it is now known. “We began by introducing Cisco IP Telephony to cut operational costs and increase productivity,” says Nick McCarthy, Network Communications Support Manager.

“This brought sustainability benefits by enabling home working - an option since taken up by around 900 staff. “We later launched a data centre virtualisation project, using VMware, which has now reached more than 50% of the server estate.”

Hillingdon’s networking team pride themselves on being early adopters of technology where it promises to deliver more cost-effective services to the community. McCarthy says they are supported in this by integrated Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions provider Logicalis, who in 2007 first helped the Council upgrade and increase the resilience, availability and performance of its core network.

By linking its core network at the civic centre to other sites around the Borough and by developing broadband connections into employees’ homes, Hillingdon took its first steps towards driving down building costs and improving communications within the Council. The network has not only transformed the way Hillingdon delivers services to the community, but also helped it save £3m on building space, £100k on external support, and £40k on telephone call charges.

It has also given the networking team the building blocks to confidently deploy a range of feature-rich applications in line with its ongoing ICT and e-delivery strategy. Logicalis has enabled them to fine-tune and extract maximum benefit from a range of performance enhancing technologies aimed at rationalising the Council’s power consumption. These include:

• Cisco EnergyWise, which measures, reports on and reduces energy consumption across the Council’s entire corporate infrastructure, significantly improving operational efficiency for any powered device - from Power over Ethernet (PoE) devices to IP-enabled building controllers
• SolarWinds, a network management tool that enables Hillingdon to monitor and improve CO² emissions on its servers, storage and switches

• Orchestrator, a tool for controlling power consumption on the Council’s PC and laptop estate

• Mediator, a building management system for controlling lighting, heating and ventilation etc.

The Outcome

“Logicalis is helping us configure our network devices so that we get the right information from these monitoring tools, says telecoms manager, Bob MacKay. “Among other benefits, this will enable us to cut our electricity bill by around £20k per annum by reducing power consumption, and save us around £70k a year in power usage on our PCs and laptops.”

“By enabling us to roll out many controls and services, the network not only helps reduce the operational cost of our energy systems, but also enables us to clearly demonstrate our commitment to carbon reduction,” says MacKay.

Research shows that almost 70% of a building's energy consumption results from heating, ventilation, air conditioning and lighting systems. Hillingdon can now move towards ‘smarter buildings’ by using its ICT to centrally control and automate security systems and power usage in outlying sites. For instance, it has now installed security gates at the staff entrance and will shortly be linking them to its IP infrastructure for recording purposes. The intelligence fed back from the door entry access system will allow the Council to activate an employee’s devices for the day. By the time they arrive at their desk, their PC will have booted up and their phone will be switched on ready to use. “Multiply the energy and cost savings across 3000 employees each year and you begin to appreciate the tangible benefits of a stable IP network,” says MacKay.

Many employees travel upwards of 70 miles each day to work, so the Council is keen to find ways of enabling them to work closer to home. Having a resilient network makes it more cost-effective to extend communications to smaller outlying sites and indeed to the homes of flexible workers. The much improved IP network infrastructure - combining voice and data traffic in a single cabling infrastructure with one set of support procedures and costs - enables the Council to support greater mobility and cost reduction by allowing employees to work and communicate remotely. “It provides remote users with guaranteed 99.999% uptime - whether they’re out helping citizens, working from home or sat at their desk in the office,” says MacKay. This not only saves on employees’ travel costs and makes more productive use of their time, but it also reduces their carbon emissions.

Without the quality of network the Council now has, MacKay says he and his colleagues would be unable to deliver many of the innovative services they are putting in place. “It has not only allowed us to use IP-based cameras for CCTV surveillance at the civic centre and outlying properties, but also enabled us to webcast funerals and weddings live via the Internet to family and friends as far afield as the US and Australia. 

Its robust network infrastructure has also allowed Hillingdon to ‘virtualise’ around 50% of its servers on just three physical machines - making significant savings in licensing costs by consolidating its devices. As early adopters of Cisco’s “shared world” technology, its networking team is continuing to work with Logicalis to integrate the network more closely with its computing environment and thereby align both worlds.

“They are assisting us in the next stage of network upgrades with the introduction of Cisco Nexus into a subset of our server access and helping to migrate us from 1Gb to 10Gb server connectivity, as well as consulting on future data centre architectures,” says MacKay. “With their help, we’ll be able to centrally manage energy consumption across the network and enable many more innovative services.”

The Future

The next step, says MacKay, will be to add video communication to the equation. “Now that the bandwidth and performance of the network are of a high standard, we can begin to introduce video phone calling between employees. Point-to-point video calls between two video cameras will dramatically reduce the Borough’s business miles for very little investment. By creating face-to-face meetings over the network, it will also empower employees and citizens to interact and collaborate like never before, and save the Council time and travel costs by attending ‘virtual’ meetings.“

“Having such an effective and ubiquitous IP network has enabled us to develop applications on a scale we could never have imagined, and allowed us to roll them out wherever we want around our organisation. In the past, we couldn’t have done these things on a one-off basis. The network has also acted as a stepping stone in raising awareness among staff as to the many ways they can reduce their carbon footprint and boost their productivity. The irony is that the network in itself doesn’t do anything - but at the end of the day, it does enable just about everything we want to do,” concludes MacKay.