Datacenters are one of the largest consumers of electrical energy in North America and thus one of the largest contributors of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Ensuring that they are as environmentally responsible as possible has become critical due to both the rising cost of energy and the onset of global climate change. There are a lot of factors that contribute to a green datacenter, among those power source and power consumption are the two biggest.
Most datacenters get their power from either coal fired generating plants or nuclear plants, some from diesel generators. None of these are green. Coal and diesel fired generators create tremendous amounts of CO2 emissions and nuclear plants, while not creating CO2 emissions, create highly toxic radioactive waste for which no safe disposal method and location has yet been developed. Green is not just about carbon, it's a holistic approach to the environment.
Of all the readily available current power sources, sufficient to run a large commercial datacenter (20M+MW Megawatts), hydro-electric power is, by far, the greenest. It produces no CO2 or any other environmental contaminant.
All of RackForce's datacenters are powered by hydro-electric energy, from the Columbia River, provided by two separate providers (BC Hydro and Fortis) via two separate grids for power redundancy. Diesel generators are used only as backup power sources in the unlikely event of a power interruption from both suppliers.
Power consumption is equally important, regardless of the source of that power as the capacity to produce energy in any system is finite. As power used one place can not be allocated elsewhere further generating capacity, on the part of the provider, may be required to offset that use, and that further capacity may not be green. Datacenters that want to be green must pursue strategies that lead to the least amount of power consumed.
The single biggest change a datacenter can make to lower power consumption is to specialize in virtual server technology. Virtual Servers use a lot less energy as they maximize the hardware resources. The typical fully dedicated, non virtual, server is only 20% utilized yet drawing almost as much power as it would if 100% utilized. Virtualization, by combining many underutilized servers onto one hardware node (or cluster) can achieve maximum hardware resource utilization and thereby save enormous amounts of power. Currently, (May, 2008), 60% of all the servers operating at Rackforce are virtual servers and we are not stopping there. In the next few months we will be launching a cloud computing service that will be totally virtualized, giving you, the consumer, the ability to order, and change, services (CPU access, RAM, storage, bandwidth) on demand. This completely eliminates the need for the traditional stand alone dedicated server.
The single largest consumer of power in a datacenter is HVAC (Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning.) Datacenters generate tremendous amounts of waste heat. RackForce has designed GigaCenter to deal with that heat in the most efficient manner. Through the use of the latest in hot/cold aisle designs, water cooled cold doors on the racks and IBMs Stored Cooling system, waste heat is efficiently dealt with using a minimum of energy. By using these efficient technologies it is possible to get power densities of 300 to 700+ Watts per sq. ft. compared to the normal 100 to 150W. sq. ft. most data centers run at. This means less space per unit of server capacity needs to be heated and/or cooled and that saves energy.
When you put all of the above together you can see why RackForce earns the designation of being green. It is a matter of pride for RackForce to constantly seek new ways to lessen its impact on the environment and the benefits get passed along to you the consumer. If you are seriously looking for ways in which to lower your carbon footprint you can not do better when it comes to finding a place to host your data than to choose RackForce as your partner.
