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There are many data centers and hosting companies who claim to operate 'green'. However "green" data centres are not created equal. A lot of hosting companies who claim to be green simply offset their energy consumption no matter what it is, with REC's. Although this is a step in the right direction, it is a long way from where we have to go. Often data centre's don't even count the electricity that is required for cooling and lighting etc and instead just offset the electricity that goes into powering the servers themselves. However, the biggest energy requirements in a data centre come from the inefficent air conditioning systems most data centre's use.
So how do you tell if a data centre is truely green?
The best indication of a data centre being truly green is it's Power Usage Effectiveness.
A data center may buy REC's to offset the dirty electricity they use, but that does not make its energy usage low. A data center may install Hot/Cold Aisles, but that does not necessarily result in the best possible energy saving. The PUE of a data center is the key figure that shows how energy efficient a data center actually is and therefore how truely green it is.
Little Web Feet's data centre has a PUE of 1.14 whereas most data centers in the US, according to the EPA, have PUE’s of 2.0 to 3.0.
How does our data centre have such a low PUE?
- The building is environmentally friendly with an R value of 50
- Virtualization cuts the server footprint by 80%
- AMD powered IBM BladeCenter servers consume less than 1/2 of the energy of regular servers
- Solar Tubes reduce energy consumed by interior lighting by 2100watts
- Low energy, water based, air conditioning systems use 90% less electricity than refrigerants
- A completely white reflective building reduces cooling needs
- The green roof, (underconstruction), can reduce cooling needs by 20degrees
The fact that our data centre has been able to reduce it's energy needs has made it possible to be the first and only 100% completely solar powered, carbon free data centre that does not need to use offsets.
Our System Uses:
- Redundant Bandwidth provided by PAETEC, Cogent and Time Warner
- Redundant Cisco 7200 VXR series routers
- Redundant Cisco ASA 5500 series firewalls
- Redundant SOURCEfire Snort 3D Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS)
- Redundant Cisco Catalyst 4500 series Gigabit switches
- Redundant Packeteer packet shapers
- Redundant Network Cards in all servers
- Redundant Power Supplies in all servers
- Redundant AMD Opteron powered IBM servers
- Redundant Clustered NetApp SAN (storage area network)
- Redundant Backup Servers
- Redundant APC Network Line Conditioners
- Redundant, Fault Tolerant Web & E-mail Servers running in VMware
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