This is the first of hopefuly many insights into how we hope to cut our carbon footprint

Running a small IT business can and does mean you have a size 11 when it comes to your carbon footprint. I have for sometime been looking at ways of cutting this, Public transport , more local jobs and no more flying. Having customers worldwide does have its problems but then again i'm in the Voip business so 99% of all business is done over the phone, by IM chats, whiteboarding or video calls.

So how to cut that shoe down to a more managible size 8?. Well where I work is in our listed cottage. All main lights are energy saving ones and downligters are LEDs. We have re insulated the Kitchen roof which should help over the winter. But the main carbon producer is Servers. and we have a few of those.

Email and firewall server, CRM server, Asterisk server. plus associated network equipment.  Cutting this down is a interesting proposal as all the systems have to remain live. The first stage has been to install VMWARE onto one of the compaq proliants. This will mean we can run seperate virtual machines for each of the original servers.

First to be moved over was the Vtiger CRM package, This has gone very well and we also upgraded to v5.4 in the process and swapped to using ubuntu, on the virtual machine we also have put Mediawiki so we can migrate that over to it as well in the future.

The next to go over will be the firewall and email server. We have installed the base software and will be migrating users over as soon as we can.

The next stage is to move our web hosting to a carbon neutral supplier, We allready use one called Hostpapa for a cutomer site and they have proved very reliable.

To keep an eye on the power usage we have installed a energy meter that keeps a track of our daily power usage, letting us see what we can do to keep power usage down.

Cyber-cottage.co.uk* were approached by Hatzola* to provide a resilient platform for the reception, recording and transferring of emergency calls to home based operators.

The proposed solution was based on two Dell servers, Asterisk and the Redfone fonebridge.

To handle the resiliency Linux HA heartbeat was installed on the servers, This controlled Asterisk, The fonebridge and the “floating IP”. All configurations are synced between servers as are all recordings. For power backup a KeySource UP was installed with a runtime in excess of 4 hours.

Since installation the system has run faultlessly except for one occasion where the primary server was switched off in error, Due to the Resiliency of the platform this was not noticed for some hours such was the seamless changeover.