loughtec Ltd

Now that the WEEE directive has taken effect, manufacturers are accountable for minimising the impact of electrical and electronic equipment on the environment, both during the lifetime of the equipment and when they become waste.

The main aim of the WEEE directive is to conserve landfill and support more sustainable development by providing an impetus to boost recycling of electrical and electronic equipment. The WEEE directive sets criteria for the collection, treatment, recovery and recycling of these products. It makes the producers of these products responsible for the financing of these activities – it’s referred to as ‘producer responsibility’.

So how does this impact your business? Well, failure to comply with the WEEE directive will result in fines.

Knowing what to do with your old PCs and electronic equipment can be a real headache for your business. With the implementation of the WEEE directive taking effect in the UK, simply throwing them away is no longer an option.

Most corporate infrastructures include many small servers running at utility and storage levels under 10% - while data volumes are quadrupling every year. Demand for support in the desktop estate is ballooning, especially as companies strive to achieve mobility, user- neutral terminals and connection independent sessions.

The solution to this is to reduce the overheads associated with infrastructure through consolidation in each of these areas – in other words, making your existing assets work harder. Desktop consolidation is now well established through thin client approaches, delivered through Server-based models from Microsoft. SAN technology offers significant management and resource efficiency savings for stored data. Finally, server virtualisation is enabling the reduction of physical presence, running costs and flexibility challenges on Intel server estate.

Every business knows that its people and its data are two of the most valuable assets that a company has. The access infrastructure connects the people to the data by making data available to servers that can process it and send it intelligibly to the users – wherever they are. When one part of this infrastructure is consolidated, it has a knock-on effect on other parts of the infrastructure.

An example: If your business has a large workforce over multiple locations, the implementation of a SAN effectively means that all data is consolidated centrally. This poses two questions:

The answer is to bring the servers to the data and the user applications to the data too – centralising everything. The basic principle is that the three elements, data, servers and user applications need to meet up, and with the experts at Loughtec to guide you every step of the way – consolidating your data to benefit your business becomes a reality.