A former Sun colleague, Jon Greaves, sent me this article a few days ago:

Norfolk Wildlife Trust now has an environmentally friendly
website, after a move this week to solar powered hosting.
Athenaeum who run EcologicalHosting.com are the only UK
based company to have an entire hosting infrastructure
powered from renewable energy sources, making it
low-impact on the environment.

Their main hosting is housed in a data centre in California.
Electricity from 120 solar panels capable of generating up
to 60 kilowatts of electricity per day provides all the power
for data centre offices, air conditioners and all computer
equipment.

By choosing to host their website with them, NWT is making
a commitment to the environment to protect the future.
Normal data centres obtain their main power from the local
grid supply, using up very large amounts of electricity that
has been generated from non-renewable sources such as coal,
gas or nuclear power stations. Solar hosting plays its part to
help prevent global warming, and so helps to preserve the
natural habitat of animals around the world.

Director of Athenaeum Jamie Simpson commented:
‘EcologicalHosting.com welcomes Norfolk Wildlife Trust to
our solar powered Internet service. Along with our other
clients they are showing the world that they care about the
environment and also making a statement that many
traditionally power hungry services like web hosting do
have viable environmentally friendly alternatives available.’

Director of Norfolk Wildlife Trust Brendan Joyce commented:
‘We are delighted to move our website to
EcologicalHosting.com, as it is another way of reducing
our impact on the environment. Our website has plenty
of information on wildlife and caring for the environment,
and now our website hosting matches our green philosophy.”

I found this fascinating and believe we’ll see more of this type of company. Power consumption is one of the largest expenses for hosting providers and when they can tap into renewables where the fuel is free, there’s a real competitive advantage to be had over the long haul. Another opportunity I see clearly is harvesting the tens of millions of btus that are exhausted from data centers. It’s not yet clear what the 20-25C resource is good for, but the person or persons who crack that nut will be very rich…


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Technorati Tags: Eco Hosting | Renewable Energy | Solar

Garden variety data center photo


Yesterday I had a conversation with a colleague who is now working in a large, and I mean large, server environment. There are many challenges he faces, but chief among them is power consumption and cost. They are now having to place their data centers according to power supply capabilities and cost rather than other business factors like proximity to trained work force and real estate cost.

My colleague mentioned that they’re spending, fully loaded with lighting, cooling, etc., some $428 per server instance per year in power costs. I agreed to not disclose the name of the company (you’d recognize it) or his name (you wouldn’t recognize it) – but the scale of this is huge. Tens of thousands of servers and tens of millions of dollars spent on power annually.

One other thing worth noting is an unwanted and unused by product of all that activity – millions and millions of excess BTUs at about 25C in temperature.

There is certainly room for improvement in this situation, even with the work that AMD and Sun have done on the power consumption side for servers.


Technorati Tags: Energy | Heat | Data Center

I am delighted to see this joint program between Sun and PG&E:

Sun Announces First-of-its-Kind Energy Rebate With PG&E

Space, power, cooling and budget are the growing constraints for every datacenter. In August of this year, Sun announced a first-of-its-kind energy rebate for its Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers with California utility PG&E. As part of PG&E’s Non Residential Retrofit program, customers replacing existing equipment with these eco responsible servers can receive a cash savings between $700-$1000 per server or up to 35 percent when combined with the Sun Upgrade Advantage Program(3). This is the first time a public utility company has offered a rebate for server upgrades, helping customers move to more efficient technology and easing their datacenter constraints.

Not only that, the Tx000 series servers consume far less power than competing systems and provide many times the performance on multi-threaded work loads, what’s not to like? Kudos to PG&E and Sun, you’re making a difference.


Technorati Tags: Energy | Rebate | Server