It’s Not Easy Selling Green

By Liam Eagle

Hosts are making big “green” hosting promises, but crafting a marketing message for green hosting can be tricky as consumers become more wary of “greenwashing” dressing ordinary products and services up in eco-friendly rhetoric

A student of the history of the green movement might consider April 22, 1990, Earth Day, the moment the environment was acknowledged as an issue of universal public interest, as more than 200 million people marked the occasion by participating in events worldwide.

It is also approximately the moment, unsurprisingly, that businesses began incorporating “green” messages into their marketing efforts in earnest, catering their messages to a well-known concern of the average person. Though in many cases, the actual shift to green business practices has been a slower process.

The green movement in the hosting business has developed quickly, and the “green hosting” message has cropped up at a similar pace in the several years since the extent of data center power consumption has become a more public concern. But unlike in many other markets, the shift to greener business practices in hosting has a direct economic motivation.

“The whole green movement,” says Curtis R. Curtis, senior VP of sales and marketing at Superb Internet, “has a lot more hype than reality to it. That said, I feel like the data center business is going to be the exception, and it has to be the exception. The economic requirements behind the greening of data centers are going to be what drives it. For data centers, greening has immediate impact. Automatically you’re going to save money.”

Hosts almost don’t have to make the decision to go green – it’s a natural consequence of increasingly costly and scarce energy resources. And it’s a cost-cutting move long-term. But they do have to make the decision on how they communicate those efforts to their customers.

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Tags: data center, Earth Day, marketing, virtualization

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.”

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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

Building the Green Data Center

By Wayne Epperson

There are a few reasons for building green, and fortunately for the environment, the business bottom line runs pretty parallel to the interests of the environment – cutting back on cooling and energy consumption means dollars saved

Environmentally conscious is a preferred business standard these days. And there is a wealth of data – appealing to both the sympathetic and the business-minded – making the case for companies to go green. In most businesses, however, the bottom line for green energy initiatives is the same as ever – reducing costs and improving earnings.

Fortunately for the environment, the bottom line for business runs pretty parallel to the bottom line for the planet in the hosting business, where power-hungry data centers account for a sizable chunk of operating expenses. If those operators can lower electricity consumption and costs while increasing efficiency – voila, they’ve joined the green revolution.

The best way for a hosting provider to go green would be to build their data center from the ground up with efficiency first on the list of directives. But if the data center already exists, it doesn’t make fiscal sense to tear it down, just to build a green one. In practical terms, there are a number of steps hosts can take to retrofit their existing operations to simultaneously reduce both their carbon footprint and operating expenses.

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Tags: AFCOM, AISO, cooling, data center, EPA, renewable energy, solar, The Planet, trade show, Uptime Institute, virtualization

Hitachi’s Harmonious Green Plan

By Liam Eagle

IT hardware giant Hitachi is using Earth Day, in Japan, as an opportunity to break ground on a data center expansion that will be a proving ground for the company’s green technology

The concept of marketing is sort of fundamentally opportunistic, so it’s no real surprise that the weeks preceding Earth Day bring a flood of promotion for environmentally-minded products and undertakings, many of them relevant and many of them worth ignoring.

But for technology with a real environmental value, Earth Day might be the perfect venue for a grand gesture.

Occurring each year on April 22, Earth Day is a kind of global observance of the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement.  That observance tends to take the form of organized events and environmentalist actions – on Earth Day 2008, the Earth Day Network organized Call for Climate, an endeavor in which it encouraged Americans (and people around the world) to call their representative or senator and “ask them to enact tough and fair climate change legislation.”

Technology giant Hitachi group participated in its own event on Earth Day 2008, a PR move designed to draw attention to the large-scale environmental undertakings at the company.

Hitachi Group marked Earth Day 2008 with the groundbreaking for an expansion to its Yokohama, Japan data center. The expansion will serve as a proving ground for many of the company’s own green technology products and ideas.

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Tags: , cooling, data center, Earth Day, Hitachi, virtualization

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