green

This week Rackspace Hosting unveiled a free online tool, which helps businesses estimate their carbon footprint. The carbon calculator takes into account all aspects of operation--commute, shipping, number of servers, etc. Developed in copperation with Native Energy--an international provider of carbon offsets and emission reductions, the service is the latest addition to Rackspace's Greenspace initiative, which promotes green technology in the data center and energy efficiency.

McKinsey & Company, a management consulting company, has released a report entitled "Data centers: How to cut carbon emissions and costs." The report provides a detailed overview of data center trends, complete with interesting facts: the carbon footprint of global data center operations equals that of the Netherlands or Argentina; and data center costs are rising almost four times faster than overall IT costs. A bit on the technical side, but a good read nonetheless.

1&1 Internet recently launched a new green data center in Lexena, Kansas. The new facility provides space for 40,000 servers and makes it possible to have equal latency for both the East and West coasts by being in the middle of major traffic areas. The company said Kansas City is one of the safest locations to have a data center because the risk of black/brownouts is minimal. 1&1 will also be purchasing purchasing Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs)to match the electricity used at the datacenter.
We talk to Mr. Thorsten Ziegler, Head of 1&1's new U.S. Data Center.

According to ReadWriteWeb, the five big data center trends this year are blade servers, green tech, virtualization, scalable cloud platforms, and Linux in the enterprise. In the full article, you can read their rationale for choosing these technologies.

HostReview: How long have you been in the webhosting business?

Con Zwinkels:We now manage more than 11,000 servers and I started with only one in 1997. Many of our clients from those early years still use our services to their full satisfaction.

Today is Earth Day, and the occasion is perfect to remind everyone that you can do your part to keep the planet nice and clean by choosing the right "green" hosting provider.

A web server, like any electrical appliance, is an indirect source of pollution. Rising eco-awareness is making many web hosting companies to go green and offer environment-friendly services to their customers. Some providers are completely powered by renewable energy sources that they own and operate, like solar and wind. Others buy electricity that is generated by utilities that offer a “green” option of electricity, generated through solar, wind, bio mass, or hydroelectric. Still others do not use electricity from alternative sources directly, but instead purchase credits that offset their carbon footprint through things like investment in renewable resource research or the planting of acres of trees.