Why 'going green' makes real business hosting sense.

Many data centre and business hosting services companies are becoming more aware of their responsibilities towards preserving the earth's natural resources.

The data centre or server room is by design, an un-environmentally friendly building and it never will be 'green'. The powering and cooling of the data centre requires huge amounts of energy, which means that their carbon footprints are high. It's estimated the average data centre uses as much electricity as 4000 homes, and that globally; data centres generate between 100 million and 150m tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. The hosting industry is keen to balance its environmental impact. Some estimates suggest that the annual power consumption of Europe's data centres is equivalent to the whole of Italy's entire power consumption. About 65% of the grid supplied power destined for UK data centres is lost during the transmission process leaving companies to efficiently manage the remaining 35%. This is not an ideal position to be starting from.

Legislation is just around the corner, wholesale power costs continue to rise, and today's server racks demand greater cooling capabilities - about a 10 fold increase over the past decade and the environmental concerns affect every industry. There is a noticeable increase in the number of environmental questions posed by hosting customers during the procurement process. In the past it has tended to be 'are you committed to reducing environmental impact' whereas today it is very much 'demonstrate how you are reducing your environmental impact.'

To do this consider following 'The EU Data Centre Code of Conduct', and install the latest in energy efficient cooling systems to data centres and provides every data centre customer with real time access to their server's energy and bandwidth consumption straight from the rack.

Simple calculations such as square footage of office space need to be used. Whilst this simple accounting arrangement heavily favours IT department operations, it prevents the organisation from driving power efficiency best practice. Logic dictates that the HR department will use less power than the IT function

Give full Profit and Loss budget responsibility to Data Centre or IT Managers for power consumption. If the IT energy costs can be directly identified then IT Managers can be personally incentivised to manage and reduce them. But targets for power reduction can only be set if consumption can be accurately measured and apportioned and this is why we are rolling out our hosting control panel. Provide the IT manager with real time usage straight from the rack. This information can then be used to determine inefficient operating practises, hardware etc and informed cost saving decisions can be made.

A further benefit of this approach is that it enables the IT manager to accurately identify power consumption costs which can then be charged back to the departments using their services. Other managers within a business may then think a little bit harder about running 5 separate web design development servers if the power costs for running them came directly from their budget!

Green hosting should not be viewed as a 'Badge of Honour' or as a buzz marketing term to attract visitors to your web site. It really must be viewed as a key business driver. Reducing costs and improving operational efficiency are critical objectives for any organisation at any time, more so during a period of global economic turmoil, and adopting genuine energy efficient measures and practises in the IT arena can help businesses achieve this.

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