DACHSER wins Green IT Best Practice AWARD 2010

9 November 2010. The internationally operating logistics provider DACHSER was one of 13 nominees invited to Berlin on Wednesday where it was awarded the Green IT Best Practice AWARD 2010 in the category “energy-efficient IT systems”.

DACHSER received the award for combining various different innovative concepts to produce a sustainable and effective overall solution:

1. Energy-efficient data centre

DACHSER’s new data centre offers several innovations: In case of fire an argon fire protection system removes the oxygen from the air; this has no adverse impact on the environment as the inert gas argon is in any case a normal component of the mixture of gases that we know as “air”. In addition, the data centre is only cooled to 24°C rather than the usual 20°C, reducing energy consumption by 15%. For high-performance servers the logistics provider uses water-cooled racks. The energy-optimized data centre is configured to have separate warm and cold aisles and was constructed with a 100cm-high raised floor with flow ducts, noticeably improving cooling efficiency.

2. Use of Network Clients (NCs)

The data centre was only needed in the first place because when traditional work stations were replaced there was a move away from Personal Computers towards Network Clients. Today DACHSER has around 7,000 NCs in use. These compact devices only require a tenth of the energy consumed by a PC. This saves the company 920,000 kWh of electricity and at the same time significantly reduces the amount of waste generated from electronic and electrical equipment.

3. Use of waste heat for new office building

Thanks to two heat exchangers, the waste heat from the data centre is collected and used to heat the office building completed in 2010. This contributes 300 kW, which is up to 50% of the energy required to heat the entire building. The remaining 50% is harvested by DACHSER using geothermal probes. The result for the logistics provider is an annual saving of EUR 23,000 on the cost of heating from fossil fuels and a reduction in its annual CO2 emissions of 144 tonnes.

“Sustainability is firmly enshrined in DACHSER’s corporate values,” says Michael Schilling, managing director of European Network Management & Logistics Systems at DACHSER. “By combining various different techniques we have been able to generate both environmental and economic benefits for the business, in the interests of sustainability,” says Stefan Selbach, manager of DACHSER’s Information Technology division.

In 2009 the family-owned company DACHSER generated total revenue of EUR 3.2 billion. 17,500 staff working in 306 profit centres worldwide handled 41.8 million consignments weighing a total of 29.4 million tonnes.

Picture: Secretary of State Cornelia Rogall-Grothe, the German Government's Commissioner for Information Technology, and Stefan Selbach, manager of DACHSER's Information Technology division, at the Green IT award ceremony.