To ask the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster what the average server capacity utilisation by each division of his Department was in each of the last five years; and if he will make a statement. (269578)

The majority of servers used by my Department are supplied under our current ICT contract by Fujitsu services. The Cabinet Office possesses fileserver storage used mainly for the storage of documents and databases. The amount used over the past four years is as follows:

We have no information about the server capacity utilisation in 2004.

The Department also has a small number of servers used for the operation of its e-mail system. The volatile nature of the e-mail traffic and the need to keep real-time backups, mean that these servers provide optimum performance at less than 20 per cent. capacity.

The Department has recently instituted a policy of moving to storage area networking (SAN) devices. These allow several applications to share a server and so make much more efficient use of its capacity. Our current SAN has a utilisation rate of 80 per cent.

To ask the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster how many (a) printers and (b) multi-function devices with printing functions were in use in each division of his Department in each of the last five years; how many such devices had a function enabling two-sided printing; and if he will make a statement. (269601)

On 17 July 2008, I launched the Greening Government ICT Strategy. Its aim is to reduce the environmental impact of the computer systems employed by all Government bodies. In the strategy, one important target is to reduce the overall number of printers used by an organisation and replace them with multi-function devices (MFDs) where security issues allow. The MFDs should use green printing defaults wherever possible.

The Department has used the following number of multi-function devices with printing functions and printers during the past five years.

All multi-functional devices are capable of two-sided printing, and indeed are set up to do so as the default.

Since 2003, my Department has had a policy of installing multi-user MFDs as the main device for printing. A number of printers have been retained, but they are only used where there are specific business reasons.