Vancouver, December 7, 2011 – RackForce, a leading Canadian provider of Hybrid Cloud and Hosting services announced today at the Vancouver VMware Forum that it has launched its latest cloud service based on VMware vCloud. This nationwide service will be provided from RackForce’s Kelowna, Calgary and Toronto cloud facilities.

With the launch of this new cloud service RackForce’s customers will now have access to VMware’s leading virtualization and cloud computing technology, namely VMware vSphere® and VMware vCloud Director. A member of the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP), RackForce’s VMware vCloud Powered service delivers a set of cloud computing services across a common platform, supporting the largest set of existing applications and offering distinctive application mobility uniquely available from VMware.

“We consistently hear that Canadian entities are not adopting the cloud because of data privacy issues and that the well known clouds do not have a Canadian service. Cloud computing and the IT agility it brings is vital to Canadian competitiveness and our economic success.  With the launch of RackForce’s VMware based vCloud Canadian organizations will now have access to world class cloud services anywhere in Canada,” commented Brian Fry, RackForce Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer.

With vCloud RackForce’s customers and its solution provider partners will now have the ability to move workloads from VMware vSphere-based virtualized or private cloud environment to RackForce’s VMware vCloud Powered service and back again. This application portability is a key differentiator allowing customers to achieve the flexibility and security they need while enabling increased IT agility.

About RackForce Networks Inc.
Canadian based RackForce is a leading provider of Hybrid Cloud and Hosting services. Its nationwide cloud ready infrastructure forms the foundation for enterprise class cloud computing, colocation and network services that are delivered to a worldwide customer base. For pictures and more information please go to: http://www.rackforce.com/information_center.html

For media inquiries, please contact:

Brian Fry
Co-Founder & Chief Marketing Officer
RackForce Networks Inc.
Office (250) 448-2226
Mobile (250) 512-1297

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CALGARY, ALBERTA – RackForce Networks and Axia announced today that RackForce’s Hybrid Cloud Services are now directly connected to Axia’s Alberta Next Generation Network, Alberta’s SuperNet.

Canadian based RackForce provides enterprise class Cloud Computing and related IT services to 1500 SMB to Fortune 500 Customers in 100 Countries around the world. Cloud services are typically offered over the Internet on a “best effort” basis, but by connecting its Kelowna, Calgary and Toronto Cloud Centers directly to Alberta’s SuperNet, RackForce is now able to provide an unprecedented level of speed, security and quality of service to Alberta customers, eliminating dependence on sometimes unreliable Internet service.

By adding RackForce’s Cloud to their IT plan, small, medium and large organizations in Alberta’s public and private sectors will also see IT services deployed in minutes as opposed to the months and at far less cost. RackForce utilizes VMware’s vCloud Director technology which enables an organization’s IT department, RackForce or a Solution Provider to deploy compute, storage, network and applications through a virtual datacenter control panel that is connected to RackForce’s cloud ready infrastructure.

“The power and reach of Alberta’s SuperNet combined with RackForce Cloud Services enables any size of organization in Alberta to really take advantage of the benefits of Cloud Computing,” Murray Sigler, President of Axia North America, commented. “This is the type of business enabling service our Alberta NGN was built for, and we are very pleased to have RackForce on board.”

Tim Dufour, Chief Executive Officer of RackForce, added, “RackForce has long been a supporter of the Open Access Network concept and its potential. We are very pleased to be working with Axia to provide our leading edge Cloud Computing Services on the SuperNet. I am convinced that customers will see unmatched agility, security and performance. Alberta now has a substantial advantage.”

About RackForce Networks Inc.
Canadian based RackForce is a leading provider of Hybrid Cloud and Hosting services. Its nationwide cloud ready infrastructure forms the foundation for enterprise class cloud computing, colocation and network services that are delivered to a worldwide customer base. For pictures and more information please go to: http://www.rackforce.com/information_center.html

About Axia
Axia’s Alberta Next Generation Network, Alberta’s SuperNet, is the link that connects Albertans to each other and to the rest of the world. It is a state-of-the-art, ultra-high-speed network that connects more than 4,700 government facilities, including government offices, hospitals, schools, libraries, municipal offices and provincial courts around the Province of Alberta. Internet Service Providers can also connect to the SuperNet and use the infrastructure to extend high-speed Internet services into rural communities. Axia enables service providers and government to connect Albertans across the province to Alberta’s SuperNet.

Axia sells services over fibre optic communications infrastructure in jurisdictions that have implemented the Axia NGN Solution.  To date, Axia has networks in Alberta, France, Singapore, Spain and Massachusetts. Axia trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol “AXX”.

Media Contact:

Dawn Tinling
VP, Investor Relations and Communications
Axia NetMedia Corporation
+1 403 538-4074
dawn.tinling@axia.com

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A full 97 percent of SMBs that have put some operations in the cloud report they got what they wanted in terms of cost savings and increased flexibility, according to a new CompTIA survey which also showed accelerated adoption of mobility technologies.A third of small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have already adopted the cloud in one way or another, and another 35 percent are expected to invest in cloud computing technology in some form in the next year, according to the latest research from CompTIA.As technology becomes more affordable and constrained budgets begin to open up, the number of SMBs using the cloud is going to double in the next year, according to CompTIA’s Third Annual Small and Medium Business Technology Adoptions Trends survey and report. The CompTIA survey of 602 IT and business professionals in SMBs in the U.S., found that the most heavily used cloud application among SMBs is storage/backup, with 71 percent of cloud-savvy SMBs using storage and backup cloud solutions. Email (62 percent) is the second most adopted cloud technology among SMBs, followed by document management (59 percent), collaboration (56 percent) and customer relationship management (53 percent).The good news for cloud services providers is that most SMBs have been quite happy with the cloud computing services and applications they use. In fact, 92 percent of the businesses that said they use some form of cloud computing reported either a positive or very positive experience. Even better, 97 percent reported their move to the cloud produced the desired results, including reduced costs and increased flexibility.

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Microsoft admits Patriot Act can access EU-based cloud data

By Zack Whittaker | June 28, 2011, 8:10am PDTSummary: Microsoft’s UK head admitted today that no cloud data is safe from the Patriot Act — and Microsoft will hand it over to U.S. authorities.LONDON — At the Office 365 launch, Gordon Frazer, managing director of Microsoft UK, gave the first admission that cloud data — regardless of where it is in the world — is not protected against the USA PATRIOT Act.

You’ve probably heard that it doesn’t matter where your data is hosted when it is in the cloud. This article demonstrates that American hosting providers, regardless of where your data is stored with them, will not be able to say NO to the US government if it wants access to your data. It has become more important then ever to:

1. choose your provider based on the privacy laws of the country in which it is based and
2. make sure the provider has located the actual data within that country or another country that is acceptable to your requirements.

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that ICT now accounts for almost 42% of energy consumption in US homes and projections by the IEA that ICT could consume 40% of the world’s electricity by 2030 means we in the ICT industry have to do something before we become the new climate villains. This is unsustainable and needs to be stopped. ICT is the one industry that has the “smarts” and is used to moving at Internet speeds with easy access to VC money. We need to act now. (BSA)

It is absolutely critical for data centers (who account for >25% of all ICT CO₂ emissions, to step up to the plate and do whatever is necessary to reduce their impact. Sadly few are.

Bill St. Arnaud recently postedOne of the big challenges we face in the Green IT industry is all the wild and exaggerated claims about the “greenness” of various products and services. As I have blogged many times most people confuse reduction in energy consumption with being green. The real problem facing the planet is not energy consumption but GHG emissions – so it is critically we measure the real objective in any product or service that claims to be green –its actual carbon footprint. Energy reduction or efficiency in many situations can be counter productive and actually increase GHG emissions.The Canadian Standards Association (CSA), one of the world’s largest standards organizations is developing globally recognized GHG standards based on the ISO 14064 to develop verifiable and auditable measurements of GHG reduction from the use of ICT. This will help quantify whether claims of lower PUE, virtualization or clouds actually do reduce GHG.They have kindly me allowed to publish the following overview of Carbon Accounting for Green IT. For those who have a genuine interest in moving beyond green washing and help reduce the GHG impact of ICT I suggest you contact the authors listed at the end of this presentation – BSAhttp://www.slideshare.net/bstarn/overview-carbonaccountingprotocol-v1

If you view that slide show you will note that RackForce plays a prominent role in it, and that’s because we believe strongly in being as green as we can. RackForce’s GKEL2 GigaCenter was designed from the outset, with the help of IBM’s Big Green team, to be the greenest commercial data center in its class in North America. Through the use of Hydro Electric power, in row cooling, absolute air separation, 30 ft. ceilings, free atmospheric cooling (air side economizer), and customized GigaVaults we have up to a 50 times smaller CO2 footprint than any other data center.As a company on the forefront of Green ICT, RackForce is pleased to be amongst a small select group working with CANARIE on the GreenStar Network Project to develop the GHG standards that Bill referred to above . Our role will be to assist the Canadian Standards Association in developing a protocol to supplement ISO 14064, to measure GHG emissions specific to ICT and supporting qualification for carbon offsets as these do not yet exist. As an organization, although we already have an extremely low carbon footprint (less than) 17gCO2eq/Kwh, RackForce has committed itself further to achieving a zero carbon status. That is not the full extent of our participation in the GreenStar Project by a long shot, but I will reserve that information for a future post.RackForce is doing its part, let’s hope the rest of the ICT industry does theirs.

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and

and

and Data center 3.0

have in common? RackForce’s new Enterprise cloud is what! The XIV SAN is fast – it uses parallel processing instead of RAID to gain redundancy and speed and by doing so is better able to allocate IOPS across the entire user base. The Cisco UCS blade system is smoking fast with 4 (6 coming soon) core CPUs utilizing Intel Xeon Nehalem E5540 CPUs with each core running at 2.53Ghz connected at 4Gbps via Fiber Channel to the IBM XIV SAN and the whole arrangements inside a data center running Cisco’s Data Center 3.0 – a unified, virtualized 10Gbps fabric. Very hot stuff. If you are looking for an Enterprise class server go check it out and contact me at work (250) 448-2203 or dalder at rackforce dot com

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Going green as a company is the right thing to do, whether for; reasons of caring about the environment; fiduciary responsibility in light of government regulations; for pure marketing reasons, or for any other reason it is still the right thing to do. The problem is how do you go about it?As you begin formulating a corporate green strategy you will soon realize that a major contributor to your corporate greenhouse gas footprint is your ICT (information Communication Technology) infrastructure. You see that every year your use of ICT grows, in some cases exponentially. How you tackle reducing that carbon footprint will make a huge difference in how green your company is, how much money you save (both now and when carbon taxes/offsets come into play) and just as important, how green your company is seen to be by your customers and the general public. As you dig further you will discover that worldwide ICT accounts for 2% (Gartner Group) of GHG emissions and of that 2%,  nearly a quarter of it (Gartner Group) comes from datacenters. That’s .5% of all GHG emissions on the planet are coming from one source – datacenters. That percentage is growing exponentially as more and more people become connected to an ICT infrastructure (think of the change in China where 8 years ago only 59M used the Internet and today it’s 384M (Reuters) and all that data needs to be stored in datacenters.If you are looking to reduce your corporate carbon footprint you need to look closely at the carbon footprint of the datacenter you currently use, be it your own in-house, or a commercial one. Not all datacenters are created equal. While there are many factors that determine how “clean” or “dirty” a datacenter is the single biggest factor is its source of power. If your datacenter is in a state or province that generates its energy from coal you are at a 5000% disadvantage over someone whose datacenter uses hydro-electric power. Let’s look at two examples of this, West Virginia which is 100% coal powered and British Columbia which is nearly 100% Hydro powered. Due to the size of the original spreadsheet I have had to remove some columns to make it fit but the gist remains.

State / Province	gCO2eq /Kwh	gCO2eq/Kwh	mTCO2eq /year 40MW Datacenter	CO2 credit cost at $20/mT/yr	yearly cost for 40MW data center at Industrial Power Rates	$ /yr power cost for a 200W server (1.752Mw)	total Data center power and CO2 cost for a 200W server / yr (PUE 3)	total Data center power and CO2 cost for a 200W server / yr (PUE 1.2)
WV	1055	1	36981	$7,393,630	$346,020	$69	$540	$136
BC	17	0.017	5956	$119,136	$436,238	$87.25	$267	$105

*PUE is Power Usage Effectiveness – a ratio of the amount of power in total the datacenter uses to the amount needed to run ICT equipment. The closer to 1 the more efficient the datacenter is.. Most commercial datacenters today are in the 2.5 to 3 range which means they need 2.5 to 3 watts incoming power to operate 1 watt of ICT equipment, very inefficient.In the table above you can see that in BC the equivalent of 17 grams of CO₂ are created for every Kilowatt hour of power generated. In West Virginia it is 1055, that’s 62 times as much! With carbon at $20 per metric ton that makes a huge difference, a $7,274,494.00/yr difference in operating costs for a 40MW datacenter and you can bet that will be passed along to its customers in higher power rates or higher square foot rates. One way or other customers will make up that shortfall while at the same time doing nothing to lower their own carbon footprint. So, how do you solve this problem?With today’s high speed fiber networks and new lossless Ethernet technologies, the answer is simple; distance truly is irrelevant when you have good network in place so find a datacenter that has a better footprint.  Find one powered by hydro-electric only, with a low PUE and a focus on being as green as they can be. I say powered by hydro because to date solar and wind power is not suitable for datacenter due to the varying amounts of power that they produce throughout the day and night. Datacenters need steady, uninterrupted power which those renewable sources cannot at this time provide (more on how they can fit in coming in a future post). Look for a provider that is not only uses green power but is actively seeking ways to produce carbon credits you can use. A double win as it were; lower your overall costs and get salable credits at the same time. Put your ICT infrastructure where it will do you the greenest good.Beware of the companies that say they buy carbon offsets to cover up for their dirty power as not only is the carbon offset industry ripe with fraudulent operators but there is also a great deal of misleading claims.  As an example, REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) schemes where people are paid to not cut down trees are not the same as schemes where trees are planted. REDD does not lower the amount of GG in the atmosphere, it is maintaining the status quo, which we have already determined needs lowering, but they are marketed as such. Even if the offset project is not a fraud there is still the problem that all you are doing is maintaining status quo – if your ITC use creates 200mT of carbon a year you buy 200mT of offsets to cover it.  That is the status quo, not green, and this is the single biggest problem with typical offsets, they do nothing to lower atmospheric concentrations of GHCs.

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The first step if you do not know the actual data center where you server is located is to ping your domain name to get your ip addressSo for example if I ping rackforce.com I getZ:>ping rackforce.comPinging rackforce.com [209.97.208.205] with 32 bytes of data:Reply from 209.97.208.205: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=253Reply from 209.97.208.205: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=253Reply from 209.97.208.205: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=253Reply from 209.97.208.205: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=253Ping statistics for 209.97.208.205:Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 1ms, Average = 0msIf you already know your IP address you can skip the above and go straight to the next step. In your web browser go to ARIN and put in your IP address in the Search WHOIS bar upper right hand corner of the page. If it returns and tells you that the IP is not in ARIN but is in APNIC, AFRINIC,RIPE, or LACNIC go there and repeat the process but what follows is for ARIN only – that is North America)

Putting 209.97.208.205 into the WHOIS form returnsOrgName: RackForce Hosting Inc.OrgID: RACKFAddress: Suite 210Address: 1628 Dickson AvenueCity: KelownaStateProv: BCPostalCode: V1Y-9X1Country: CAReferralServer: rwhois://rwhois.rackforce.com:4321NetRange: 209.97.192.0 – 209.97.223.255CIDR: 209.97.192.0/19NetName: RACKFORCE-2NetHandle: NET-209-97-192-0-1Parent: NET-209-0-0-0-0NetType: Direct AllocationNameServer: NS1.RACKFORCE.COMNameServer: NS2.RACKFORCE.COMComment: Rwhois pending.RegDate: 2004-05-07Updated: 2005-01-27and you can see by that the IP Address 209.97.208.205 is hosted at RackForce. Now, on to the meat of this post and why we dallied so to begin with.

If we look at energy, first we will see how the source of that energy is important when considering the carbon footprint of a data center.

While wind/solar energy are obviously the best (Nuclear is good, as far as carbon is concerned, but there are other problems with it as a source of energy) but they are not reliable as there is a problem with energy storage for when the wind is not blowing, or the sun is not shining. Efficient data centers require a very large amount of power (~40MW) and that power has to be continuous, without fluctuation. That leaves hydroelectric power as the best source of power for a data center. Right away, you can see that if a data center uses hydro instead of coal it has approximately a 99% reduction in its carbon footprint.

Of course getting 100% pure hydro-power is difficult. Unless it connects directly to a dam then a data center is on one of the many electrical grids out there in which case it is getting a mixed power feed. That needs to be considered when calculating your footprint. When you do, you get a picture (for Canada and the US) like this

Take for example British Columbia in Canada (green arrow on the left). Almost exclusively hydroelectric but does use some natural gas for peak time generation. Thus instead of being around 5 gCO2eq/Kwh (grams CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour) it is approximately 17 gCO2eq/Kwh, then look at West Virginia which is 100% coal powered (the US power grid is 50 to 52% coal generated) and it is 1055 gCO2eq/Kwh. Where would you rather get the juice from that powers your ICT equipment? Green locations, 20 grams CO2 or less range, 200 or more is extreme – 10X worse.—starts just a little ways into chart. The source of power becomes even more important when we start increasing the efficiency of data centers. In economics, there are principles (Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate) that state that improvements in energy efficiency work to increase, not decrease, energy consumption by reducing the cost of the amount of work achieved for energy spent. Thus if you make your data center super efficient it will lead to greater power consumption2 and instead of reducing your footprint you will increase it and the dirtier your source of power is the worse your footprint will be. However, this must not be seen as an argument against efficiency, there are other tangible benefits that flow from efficiency, but rather as an argument for selecting the greenest power source fueling that efficiency ¹

Let’s look at an example of two data centers, one in West Virginia and the other in British Columbia. Based on the data from Stats Canada, Environment Canada, & US Department of Energy that I researched I was able to build a spreadsheet showing the likely carbon cost for operating a server in each province and state (click on image below for a readable version)(terms: gCO2eq/Kwh= grams of CO2 equivalent per Kilowatt hour, mTCO2eq/Mwh = metric Tonnes CO2 equivalent per Megawatt hour, PUE = Power Usage Effectiveness a way of measuring how efficiently a data center uses the incoming power, that is what is the ratio of power used by the data center to the amount of power required to operate the ICT [Infornation Communications Technology] equipment (servers, switches, routers) – 1:1 would be perfect but basically impossible)

Now let’s see what that could mean to your business.

Say each data center is 120,000 sq. ft. raised floor (not at all unusual) Now allow a standard 32 sq. ft. per cabinet. That would give you a maximum number of 3125 racks (120,000/32) and each rack can hold a maximum of 42u worth of gear (a standard rack) but some of that will be the power distribution units of the data center and likely some of their networking gear too, so in general you will get around 36u of usable space. Assume you put 36 1u 200W servers in those slots. That gives you 112,500 servers in those 3125 racks. In BC, each of those servers would cost you an additional $1.06 per year. In West Virginia that would be $65.72 extra per server (the actual results would be higher though as a 120K sq. ft. data center would use up at least 20% of that space on aisles and various components needed to run a data center.) which, translates to $2365.92 instead of $38.16per rack per year extra. How will you justify that extra $2327.76 per rack per year to your shareholders?

The calculations above though were theoretical. They were based on a data center with perfect utilization of energy. That is for every watt of power required to run the ITC equipment in that data center they only used 1 watt of incoming power. Sadly, that is not the case and the average data center today has a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 2.5 (and many are much worse – that is an average). That means they need to purchase 2.5 watts of power for every watt they sell to their customers. Now go back to the last paragraph and multiply those final numbers by 2.5. Your extra cost is now $4654.52 per rack.

If your company is a public company then, as carbon taxes and/or carbon Cap &Trade becomes legislated then you will have a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders to seek out the option that has you paying the least amount of taxes in order to maximize your returns. If you are a private company then you still need to consider the source of what powers your servers lest your competition beats you to it and gets a substantial edge in costs over you.

I hope that’s given you some food for thought

¹Bill St Arnaud has informed me that I have misinterpreted Khazoom-Brookes – he states:

[Khazoom-Brookes] basically states that energy efficiency at a micro scale increases energy consumption on a macro scale. In a steady state world it is very easy to achieve true and measurable energy reduction through energy efficiency for an individual data center or computer. But the macro effect over time, is that energy efficiency reduces the cost of operating a data center and/or computer which therefore creates more business in terms of additional data centers and/or computer installations. The net effect, is that although each data center and/or computer is more energy efficient, on a global basis there is many more of them and the aggregate effect is overall greater energy consumption.

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In our first two entries, we have talked about The Greening of ICT and about  The Importance of Power and location in choosing a low carbon datacenter.

You can read more at:   http://www.thewhir.com/blogs/Brian_Fry

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