Web Hosting’s Green Movement

By Dennis McCafferty

There’s a shift going on in the hosting world, toward eco-friendly business - as a community of industry associations, government organizations and other would-be policy makers work to define “green” hosting

It may not be easy being green – but it could be worth the effort.

That’s the picture painted by recent activity in the hosting industry: Environmental policy advocates and government leaders are working with industry executives to explore virtualization and other practices as ways of reducing dependence on the energy-sapping equipment now fueling data centers.

In New York, one hosting company is using hybrid vehicles to transport servers, among other efforts.

And in San Antonio, Rackspace, another host, isn’t only turning to virtualization as a way to reduce consumption – it’s launching a comprehensive, company-to-customer series of green initiatives, including supporting wind turbine farms in the US.

“Why are we doing this?” says John Engates, CTO of Rackspace. “Because the environment right now is in a very dangerous state. Internet and data-center infrastructure are growing at a very fast pace, and we’re going to ruin the planet if we don’t do anything about it. As a large data-center operator, our customers expect us to take the initiative to do the right thing. But there are self-serving reasons as well. We save on energy costs and equipment costs to our customers by doing this, and that puts us in a better financial situation.”

 

Web hosts are turning to both non-profit environmental policy organizations – as well as federal, state and local government officials – to get a better sense of how to move forward. Rackspace, for example, is working with a local utility in the UK to incorporate renewable energy practices into its data center there.

“It’s very important to work with people at these levels,” Engates says. “It adds legitimacy to what we’re doing. And if the federal government and non-profit groups can come up with best practices for us to follow – instead of leaving us on our own to figure it all out – it’s very useful. We in the hosting industry are all aware that the operation of our data centers could lead to regulatory oversight in the near future. We’d rather get ahead of the curve on that, rather than end up caught off-guard if and when such regulations set in.”

While both private and public sector partnerships are resulting in green initiatives, the movement is in its very early stages, executives and policy experts say. But it’s gaining momentum, as the federal government recently issued a high-profile call for the hosting industry to act: In response to a congressional directive, the US Environmental Protection Agency in August completed a detailed study of the impact of data centers and servers on energy consumption and concluded that the industry sector required 61 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006, at a cost of $4.5 billion. That’s more than the electricity needed to power all of the color TVs in the country, and double the amount of electricity used for data centers and servers in 2000. Volume servers account for the vast majority of the sector’s use, at 68 percent, the EPA reported, and, if this trend continues, the energy needed to fuel data centers and servers will nearly double again within five years, to more than 100 billion kilowatt-hours at a cost of $7.4 billion a year.

Many data centers today are windowless buildings with little air flow supporting endless numbers of servers and network equipment, resulting in a massive generation of heat that must be cooled to ensure continued operations. The EPA has urged industry leaders to adopt a number of preventative measures, including increased efficiency of operations, such as better airflow management to meet cooling needs; installation of more energy-efficient practices and equipment impacting fans, pumps, chillers and other equipment; and state-of-art innovations, such as more sophisticated, energy-saving direct liquid cooling and the use of waste heat to provide cooling power. Web hosting companies that implement these practices could reduce energy use by 20 to 55 percent, according to the EPA.

The EPA has called for federal government to work with private industry to address the consumption issues, and to possibly expand the agency’s high-profile Energy Star program to cover equipment and machinery needed for data-center operations. Currently, equipment qualifying for the EPA’s Energy Star program – like hot-water heaters, air conditioners and refrigerator units – is considered highly energy-efficient, providing an incentive for homeowners and businesses to buy. In March, the WHIR reported that data center owner and operator 365 Main had become the first such operator to join the EPA Energy Star program as a partner. 365 Main will track its energy performance using Energy Star tools to come up with a plan to reduce consumption, and it will contribute to the development of an Energy Star standard for Data Centers. What’s more, the company’s Oakland data center will work with Pacific Gas and Electric to reduce energy consumption by more than 1.67 million kWh by pursuing more energy-effective design and construction.

Still, the EPA and local and state governments are mainly acting in an advisory capacity. Efforts to put more teeth into regulatory laws have failed, says Toby Velte, author of Green IT: Reduce Your Information System’s Environmental Impact While Adding to the Bottom Line, due in October from McGraw-Hill. On the positive side, however, US congressional lawmakers recently supported action to tie federal contract awards to the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT), a widely used system that sets standards related to consumption for manufacturers. “Since the government buys so many computers,” Velte says, “it’s likely that manufacturers for the hosting industry will try to meet EPEAT certification requirements to make sure they can sell to the government.”

But environmental policy advocates say much progress needs to be made. While considerable awareness has been raised based upon EPA programs and other public and non-profit efforts, more than 70 percent of technology executives surveyed say they believe their companies do little harm to the environment, according to a recent report on ”green” strategies and technology released by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Only 13.5 percent of those surveyed indicate that they’d withdraw a product due to poor environmental performance, and just 28 percent say they’d expand product portfolio to include more environmentally minded.

It’s not simply a matter of community and global responsibility that should motivate a hosting company to adopt more energy-conserving approaches – these practices pay off on the bottom line with improved computing, network, storage and energy-cost management, according to the Green Grid, a global consortium with more than 140 IT industry members dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers. Founded in 2007, the Grid’s board of directors includes senior executives from AMD, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Rackable Systems, Sun Microsystems, VMware and SprayCool.

Among other projects, the Grid has assembled technically precise blueprints to offer hosting companies guidance on reducing consumption, as well as analysis of the various data center equipment used within, and metric-based analysis of each model’s impact on energy usage. Floor layouts, for example, could be designed with hot-aisle and cold-aisle configurations to reduce impact, and vented floor tiles can be better used to increase cool airflow. Close-coupled cooling can be installed, to focus cooling efforts where needed in the server racks, rather than large, open areas. Virtualization can reduce the number of servers required, floor space needed and cooling cost.

“The process of virtualizing servers – taking multiple single machines out of operation and virtualizing them onto a blade server – can save data centers real estate,” says Velte, supporting solutions the Grid has outlined. While he serves as a senior business development executive for Avanade, an IT consultancy, Velte is not a member of the Green Grid.) “Plus, it saves in the cost of equipment, power and cooling. The data center is where the most money can be saved, and the least amount of damage is done to the environment as a result. If 14 servers are consolidated into one, the hosting company will save thousands. Given the potential for the number of servers to double in five year’s time, I’d think the hosting industry would love to just be able to keep infrastructure costs constant over this period. That’s an achievable goal.”

Cost savings over the long run aren’t enough to convince many data-center operators, who are often more concerned about the initial cost of equipment than the advantages of energy savings over the long run, the Grid reports.

“IT buyers still go for less-expensive servers with inefficient power supplies because the benefits of higher-efficiency power supplies are not obvious,” says Tony Pierce, a director of the Green Grid.

Rackspace is one hosting company that’s working with the Grid to come up with alternatives that make sense. With eight data centers around the world serving 15,000 customers, it’s now partnering with NativeEnergy, a marketer of energy-saving resources for companies and private homes, to provide “carbon neutral web hosting.” It’s not just a matter of adopting more energy-efficient equipment and designs in the data centers, as the company’s offerings to its hosting customers are also more eco friendly now. A recent, Rackspace-conducted survey reports that 62 percent of its hosting customers are concerned about ways to reduce the impact on the environment, or are actively addressing the issue.

To address this concern, Rackspace has adopted AMD and Intel processors that consume far less energy than previous processors. One current Rackspace operating system offering describes an AMD processor that uses 28 percent fewer watts than comparable processors; RAM that requires about 40 percent less energy; and a hard drive that reduces power by 30 percent.

“Customers have been asking about this,” Engates says. “In the survey, they indicated they wanted to host operations while taking some responsibility for the environment. This is one way for them to do it without hosting it themselves and trying to build their own data centers. They can outsource green hosting.”

Rackspace is also practicing the message it’s packaging: At its offices, the company uses non-pesticide based chemicals for lawn maintenance, hiring only green-certified office cleaners and eliminating foam cups and plates in break rooms. In another show of industry collaboration with public-interest projects, Rackspace is actively seeking to offset resulting carbon emissions by supporting energy-renewal projects, such as a wind-turbine farm run by the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, and the planting of more than 1,100 trees in Britain. This is hoped to counter the impact of its services on the local environment.

Other hosting companies are also – via collaboration with public-interest groups, the government on or their own initiative – launching energy-savings policies and practices.

Logicworks, a New York-based managed hosting provider, recommends power-efficient servers when possible, although it has found that this isn’t an option for clients with high-transaction databases, which account for the majority of its client base. To counter that, Logicworks now offers carbon-footprint reducing offset tools for its customers via TerraPass, a San Francisco-based company that markets these offsets. (TerraPass allows for companies to buy “credit” toward environmentally focused projects, to make up for consumption on the part of those companies.) Logicworks also says it is making maximum use of natural light and things like water-saving bathroom fixtures in its corporate headquarters. Logicworks is that company transporting servers in hybrid vehicles.

“We’ll even be buying carbon offset credits for vehicles, which many people find amusing,” says Logicworks’ Kenneth Ziegler, president and chief operating officer. “In most cases, our customers are eager to get involved with our program with TerraPass, because the nominal cost of getting involved is relatively low compared to the resulting environmental benefits. My guess is, in the long term, many of these initiatives will have a positive effect on our bottom line. We’re still in the learning stages though, so it’s too early to put any concrete metrics around what exactly it means at this time. Our green initiatives are for the environment’s benefit, not for profit. It is our current way of taking a leadership position among hosting firms for future generations to benefit from.”

Marco Luzuriaga, president of Washington-based LimeLeap Solutions, says that his company – which changed its name from Intersoft to reflect its environmental focus sense – hasn’t had much interaction with the federal government on ways to initiate green practices. Instead, the company has found local governments and non-profits of value. But those groups need to be educated from an industry point of view – especially from an IT perspective. Luzuriago will tell them about his company’s efforts, how it shuts down 2,000 desktops at night when not in use to save about $65,000 in electric every year, as well as its continuing virtualization and retrofitting efforts.

“Most of these non-profits and local agencies are focused on offices and recycling,” Luzuriaga says. “We want to make sure the IT component isn’t overlooked. So we’re working with them on that, to get the message out to other companies that server virtualization reduces disaster recovery times and allows for quicker scalability – saving on energy and cooling needs. Often though, the savings are not apparent and need to be more obvious. I’m always amazed when I walk into a hosting facility that’s burning electricity to cool down equipment when it’s 20 degrees outside! The economics of retrofitting such a facility should be obvious.”

Red Rocks Data Center now operates what is intended to be a model green facility out of a former NASA satellite uplink center in Morrison, Colorado, as it’s pursuing the use of solar panels; bio-diesel generators; natural lighting; wind-generated power; virtual private servers, cutting down on energy costs; and a 260-foot-long “heat exchanger” tunnel that can more efficiently funnel cool air into the building.

“From our location, we’re sitting on a gold mine of renewable energy and environmental advantage,” says Tom Nats, president of Red Rocks. “It was not only good environmental stewardship, but good business to pursue these initiatives. In the summer, air conditioning has accounted for 70 percent of our costs. With the most up-to-date equipment and expertise, we can keep prices low for our customers.”

Tags: AMD, blade server, cooling, data center, Dell, EPA, government, HP, IBM, Intel, LimeLeap, Logicworks, Rackable Systems, Rackspace, renewable energy, solar, SprayCool, Sun Microsystems, TerraPass, The Green Grid, virtualization, VMware