With December now upon us and the winter settling in, or summer for our friends down under, we’re officially in the holiday season and Christmas is just around the corner.

At SirsiDynix we would like to thank each of our great customers for being with us through another year.  To show our appreciation, we thought about sending a gift to each of you, but we realized that not everyone at your library would benefit, and any gift we sent would be gone in very short order. 

So instead we’ve decided to give you the gift that keeps on giving, every day, 365 days a year, and benefits everyone, from the dedicated teams working at your library to your patrons or students, and your family.  Our gift from us to you is making the world a cleaner, greener and better place to live.  At SirsiDynix we’re committed to improving the environment, and following the commitment in the company’s environmental policy, we’ve made major changes around the globe to reduce our carbon footprint and impact on the environment.

No change has been more dramatic than the launch of our ultra-modern IT infrastructure last month.  As part of our move to the new SirsiDynix Technology Centre, we made major changes to our IT datacenter that runs our worldwide operations, and the results are staggering.  We virtualized over 380 servers into a single high-end, highly redundant rack of servers and storage that utilizes 1.5 terabytes of memory, which dramatically reduces our computer hardware requirements both now and in the future.  We also installed a thermal containment unit over our new server racks, allowing us to eliminate raised floors, eradicating the need for extra materials, and run our datacenter cooling at over 90% efficiency.  Moreover, we’ve added more redundancy than ever before to ensure optimal performance, with dual power to each server, dual internet fiber coming into the building, dual internet providers, dual air conditioning, battery backup power throughout the office in addition to a standby 1 megawatt generator.  Even with all of these dramatic improvements, we reduced the size of our datacenter by 88%, saving over 3,000 square feet of office space, and reduced our power consumption an astounding 76% from 54 kilowatts to 13 kilowatts. 

This commitment to the environment also extends to all of our offices worldwide.  Over the past 18 months SirsiDynix has relocated every one of our worldwide offices to new, cleaner and greener locations.  The flagship of these changes is the new SirsiDynix Technology Centre located in the Salt Lake City area.  We’re excited that our new global headquarters is in a LEED-certified green building.  For those not familiar with this, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program is an internationally recognized green building certification standard that requires buildings to meet measurable standards that improve a building’s design, construction, operations and maintenance.  The LEED program promotes sustainable building design by incorporating standards that use eco-friendly building materials, energy efficient products and design such as abundant natural light, and design ideas that reduce the impact on the environment, such as capturing and reusing rainwater to prevent runoff.

Not only have we incorporated these ideas in our new Technology Centre, we’ve embraced them throughout the world.  Each of our offices is now located within walking distance of mass transit rail, allowing our employees to commute without using a car.  In addition we’ve made numerous other changes throughout, such as adding recycling, replacing all disposable cups with reusable mugs and tumblers, and using copy paper with a minimum of 30% recycled content.

When we’re done using equipment in our offices, we donate it to local charities so it can be reused.  For example, the substantial datacenter equipment that we replaced this year was donated to a host of charities, including the Boy Scouts of America, the Food & Care Coalition of Provo, Utah Valley University, Utah PTA and Ability First.

While we’ve made dramatic changes to reduce our carbon footprint, we recognize that we still have some impact on the environment.  To offset this, SirsiDynix is a proud contributor to the Nature Conservancy’s Plant a Billion Trees project.  This bold project’s goal is to plant 1 billion trees over 1 million acres of land in the tropical rainforests of Brazil.  To date The Nature Conservancy has already planted 9.9 million trees. You can learn more about this exciting project at plantabillion.org.

While it may not be as sweet as a box of chocolates, we believe that our gift to you will make everyone in your community and family healthier and make the world a better place to live.  As someone that is also personally committed to the environment and a Nature Conservancy member, I couldn’t think of a better present to receive than this.