HostReview talks to John Engates of Rackspace about green hosting and the sweet spot of performance and efficiency

Recently Rackspace announced the results of their second annual green technology customer survey, the completion of an energy-efficient data center, a second annual GreenDay for employees, and an expanded partnership with NativeEnergy to reduce the company’s carbon footprint. We talk to Mr. John Engates, CTO, Rackspace Hosting, about the company's latest green hosting initiatives.

What is Rackspace’s motivation for introducing the Green Space initiative and extending it into a second year?

John: Rackspace introduced Greenspace last year as a company-wide program to promote energy conservation, carbon offsets and employee education to reduce Rackspace's contribution to climate change. Data centers are known to be large contributors of carbon emissions and power usage. So part of Greenspace is leveraging our vendors like Dell and AMD to produce the most energy efficient products. To address the carbon emissions issue, we partnered with NativeEnergy, a leading national marketer of renewable energy credits and carbon offsets, to offset carbon emissions for all new servers brought online.

The most important finding of this year's "green" survey seems to be that, compared to last year, fewer companies are taking steps to lessen their impact on the environment. What is the reason for that, and do you think we will see even less green companies in 2009?

John: I can only speculate, but my guess is that companies are feeling the pinch of higher fuel costs on other facets of their business and may feel like spending extra on green technology that doesn't directly save them money isn't in the budget right now. I don't think we'll see a trend toward less green companies...they'll just want to make certain that they're really getting a return on the green investment. It needs to be transparent that the money they're spending on green tech will translate into lower energy costs over the long term. It should actually be easier to make that case if energy costs continue to rise.

What, in your opinion, are the other major findings of the report, and what are their implications for the future of the hosting industry?

John: Obviously the big things we see out of this survey are that customers want green products, but they want them at the same prices they pay now, if not cheaper, and they don’t want to give up performance to do it. I think hosting in itself is cheaper, easier and potentially more green than doing it yourself. Not only do we have larger facilities which are more power efficient, new products like virtualization and cloud computing are much easier and cheaper to manage through a hosting provider. With the cloud, you only pay for what you use, cutting back on excess power consumption and carbon emissions.

Can a well-executed strategy on part of a service provider remove the premium on green solutions altogether?

John: That's a tricky question. There will always be technology advancement that can be had to be greener tomorrow that you were today and it will likely cost more to get that latest greatest green technology. Rackspace's job is to continually find the sweet spot of performance and efficiency and then use our leverage and buying power with our vendors to bring that technology to market and therefore make it easy for our customers to make the best choices about green technology.

Which of Rackspace's several green projects you consider to be most challenging and interesting? Is Rackspace planning additional steps towards energy efficiency and renewable energy in the datacenter?

John: Everything we do is challenging and exciting. The UK is doing great things with the recent launch of our new Slough data center powered by renewable energy. I also see great potential in the area of cloud computing. Our Mosso division is doing really cool things, like the new CloudFS storage product which should provide super scalable, utility storage. With each new data center, we are incorporating the latest technologies and building practices to make sure we deliver on the promise of green IT.