August 01, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Update: Web-host company fully embraces solar
Correction: In the original version of this article, I mistakenly suggested that Greenest Host was the owner of the solar-powered datacenter I discuss. The facility belongs to AISO; Greenest Host is leasing a portion of the datacenter for its Web-hosting operation.
Additionally, I reported that Greenest Host is running 600 servers. They say they've reserved enough space to run as many as 600, though at the time of writing, they are unable to provide a specific figure.
I apologize for any confusion I may have caused.
While large companies such as Microsoft and Google have gingerly plugged in to the sun's energy, a newly announced Web host called Greenest Host is fully basking in it, with much thanks to AISO (Affordable Internet Service Online).
Following the lead of other companies seeking to boast green credentials, San Diego, Calif.-based Greenest Host has set up its Web-host service in AISO's 100-percent solar-powered datacenter. The facility is located in the inland desert of Southern California where its solar panels can soak up the sun year 'round.
The appeal of being a fully solar-powered company was strong for the company's CEO Mike Corrales. "Personally, my core values tend to skew toward green application and green causes," he says. "We wanted to make it really easy for end consumers and small businesses to be able to build their own Web sites in a way that coincided with their own personal value system."
According to Phil Nail, founder of AISO, many organizations have been turning to his company's hosting services for similar reasons. "We've seen a lot of that," says Nail. "Even out of the U.K, they're really coming out of the woodwork. A lot of companies have decided to resell our service."
By day, AISO's servers feed directly off the panels. By night, they get their power from batteries that store the excess solar energy. But the company has a backup plan. "[AISO.net] has a backup generator that runs on propane, just in case there is a shortage, or for some reason, we went 30 days in a row without sun," says Corrales.
Inside the datacenter, AISO runs new AMD Opteron-powered servers, "which use 60 percent less energy and generate 50 percent less heat" than the previous generation, according to the company.
"[AISO] worked closely with AMD to make sure that we have the best possible solution for our green datacenter. Because of their willingness to literally work hand-in-hand through the entire design and development process of the datacenter infrastructure, [AISO] felt that AMD was and still is the only way to go," says Corrales.
And, of course, AISO employs virtualization (from VMWare, specifically) "to reduce cooling and electrical requirements with a 30:1 ratio of virtual servers to physical servers."
For cooling, AISO uses two Energy Star-compliant systems from Freus. The cooling systems monitor outside air temperature, according to the Greenest Host, and when it reaches 50 degrees or below, "they suck the outside air in, filter it, and direct it into the datacenter, thus saving electricity when it's cool outside."
Moreover, AISO employs redundant environmental monitors from APC. These act as smoke alarms, but they also monitor humidity and cooling levels. "In case of a cooling issue, our support staff is notified immediately. This ensures all servers are maintained in a cool environment, which will prolong the life of the servers," according to the company.
The datacenter itself is built from steel and multiple layers of environmentally friendly insulation, the company says. The design keeps the cool air in and the hot air out, thus reducing the amount of energy necessary to run the facility.
AISO is also in the process of adding a green roof, which it says will reduce cooling and heating requirements by up to 50 percent. (A green roof, essentially, is a layer of soil and vegetation atop a building.)
Moreover, the company has a to-do list of other innovative and eco-friendly projects, according to Nail. "We are adding an underground water-storage tank to recycle grey water. Next, we are installing a new solar-panel automated-washing device we created. This will automatically wash the solar panels each morning, and all excess water will be filtered back into the storage tank. We'll also be using the storage tank water to water our landscape," he tells me via e-mail.
Given the green wave that's swept the business world, Corrales anticipates organizations will be lured by the eco-friendly nature of the service. "We can have an ethically superior choice available for people, but they don't have to sacrifice higher performance," he says. "Our pricing is pretty in line with all the major standard Web-hosting options out there."
Greenest Host will open to the public on Aug. 1. For more information, go to greenesthost.com. For more information about AISO, go to aiso.net.
Posted by Ted Samson on August 1, 2007 01:31 PM
June 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Alternative-power datacenter part of Rackspace green initiatve
New green facility, carbon offsets part of managed datacenter-hosting company's eco-friendly initiative
Rackspace has joined the ranks of companies such as HP, IBM, Dell, and Yahoo announcing plans to become better environmental stewards by embracing carbon reduction, energy conservation, and other green initiatives.
A managed datacenter hosting company with 90,000 square feet of space worldwide, Rackspace today announced that as part of its GreenSpace campaign, it's planning to open a new data center next year in the Slough, England region which will be powered directly by alternative energy from a utility called Slough Heat and Power.
Also, the company has teamed up with NativeEnergy, a national marketer of renewable energy credits and carbon offsets. Rackspace plans to purchase offsets through NativeEnergy for each new customer server it brings online. Specifically, the company will buy offsets through a wind farm project, which powers at Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota, as well as a methane project that powers a dairy farm in Pennsylvania.
The practice of purchasing carbon offsets has garnered criticism from some environmentalists, arguing that companies should take direct measures to reduce CO2 pollution. But Rackspace CTO John Engates said that it's difficult to find utilities in the U.S. offering direct alternative energy. "As power and utility companies in regions we work have alternative power available to buy directly, we'll explore that," he said.
In addition to reducing its carbon footprint, Rackspace has been looking at other ways to reduce its energy consumption, including choosing servers that use less power. "Primarily, we buy from HP and Dell. HP has servers that are our primary model: a dual-process, dual-core server that is many times more efficient than servers of two generations ago," Engates says.
The ongoing chip wars between AMD and Intel have affected which hardware the company buys. "When Intel had problems with power and AMD was winning, we switched to AMD for a vast majority of our deployments," says Engates. "Intel is back on par, perhaps in the lead, and we're starting to offer the latest Intel processors to our customers."
Like other IT leaders, Engates is also concerned about there being sufficient energy available in the future. "If we don't pay attention to this and start to cut power usage, we all in for power problems down the road. We'll still need to continue to build power plants, but hopefully, we won't have to add as many if we can work on programs like these down the road," he says.
Companies like Rackspace are also increasingly concerned with their image as it pertains to energy usage. "The fact that dactacenters are going to be large consumers of power means that we need to work on [conservation]. We don't want to be the bad guys. People will eventually look for large-scale users of power and will ask them to cut their consumption," Engates says.
Finally, in addition to being an active member of The Green Grid consortium, Rackspace is working to foster environmental awareness and education among employees. For instance, the company had a its first "Green Day" event earlier this month, inviting more than fifteen vendors and non-profit organizations to present employees with environmentally friendly tips and product alternatives.
Posted by Ted Samson on June 11, 2007 09:26 AM
May 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Datacenter outsourcing yields green opportunities
Datacenter space is in high demand these days, and like energy prices, that demand appears to be headed nowhere but up. In fact, Digital Realty Trust, a San Francisco-based REIT, estimates that demand for datacenter space will continue to rise by as much as 15% annually over the next five years.
While that's bad news for companies struggling to maintain sufficient infrastructure to keep up with seemingly insatiable demands for computing power and storage, it's been quite a boon for companies that offer datacenter hosting services. According to Tier1 Research, that industry enjoyed 35% growth last year, raking in $15 billion in annual revenue.
Indeed, more companies -- including larger, publicly traded corporations -- are turning to third-parties for collocation and hosting services, and the appeal is evident: Beyond the recognized traditional benefits of outsourcing, it gives companies a means of keeping up with growth, without having to invest time and money in new or upgraded facilities. But having had an interesting conversation with Bob Stephens, senior director of data center operations at NaviSite -- which manages 125,000 square feet of hosted data center space across 14 facilities worldwide -- I believe that outsourced model can provide companies with a potentially greener way to do business, in part thanks to the magic of economies of scale.
"I can deliver these services more efficiently than you can do them in-house," Stephens says. "We're adding value for our customers, both in terms of being environmentally friendly as well as from a business standpoint," he said.
As datacenters have grown hotter thanks to technology such as high-density blades, air-conditioning costs have gone up. And many a datacenter lack efficient cooling, because when they were designed, architects weren't thinking about racks running at 30kw.
It might be difficult for the average datacenter manager to justify the ROI on building a state-of-the-art, highly efficient HVAC system. However, a company like NaviSite is able to cut waste, and save money, through its advanced cooling system, according to Stephens. "We're talking about picking up 15 and 20% efficiency in the amount of power it takes to cool the data center," he said.
One of NaviSite's tricks is a proprietary monitoring system that, according to Stephens, works on a very granular level. Temperature probes monitor and manage the air that goes into and flows of out of server. Through sophisticated algorithms, the system adjusts the varying speed of the fans to optimal levels.
Not all of NaviSite's techniques are necessarily cutting-edge, though. The practice of employing raised floors with vented tiles to directly flow cool air into the hardware as been around for a while now, but it's still effective: The approach means the chilled air need only be around 72 degrees instead of 55. "You can see small incremental percentages can make a big difference scaled over large quantities," he said.
To further reduce those pesky heating costs, Stephens is also investigating ice storage cooling systems, provided by companies such as Calmac and Cyrogel. These systems essentially use power at night, when it's less expensive, to create large quantities of ice, then store it in non-corrodible tanks. The frozen H20 is used the next day to cool the building.
Like other companies, such as Ecos Consulting, NaviSite is also increasing energy efficiency through the usage of DC power, which he says results in another 15% reduction in power usage.
NaviSite also is investigating replacing its traditional battery UPS systems with flywheels, which works by rotating a rotor to a very high speed to store up energy, which can be transformed into electricity. The benefit is, you can save money in the long run by not having to replace thousands of batteries every two or three years.
A flywheel UPS, from companies such as Pentadyne and Liebert, may not deliver the 20 to 30 minutes of backup power that a battery UPS can during a power outage, a fact that might give some customers pause. But, he argues, "You don't need to buy hundred of thousands of dollars worth of batteries."
While there are benefits to be had through the hosted data-center model, any sort of outsourcing relationship needs to be approached with care. In a recent report titled "Data Center Power and Cooling Scenario: Options for the Road Ahead," Gartner stresses that simply going with an outsourcer to address power and cooling concerns isn't a prudent move. Rather, an "organization must go through the process of benchmarking its delivery quality and cost of service provision and make the necessary optimization changes before handing over to a third party."
That includes doing your due diligence in researching your would-be partners; exercising great restraint in putting your most business-critical IT services and data in the hands of a third party; ensuring the provider meets all your security, bandwidth, and support needs; and devising an air-tight SLA.
Also bear in mind that as demand for these types of services grow, hosting providers have been raising their rates accordingly, Data Center Knowledge reports.
Still, I do like the hosted datacenter model. Being able to share resources in an efficient and eco-friendly manner while cutting costs is a potentially winning proposition, and it's what sustainability is all about.
Posted by Ted Samson on May 3, 2007 03:00 AM
