Carbon conscious hosting

Companies are coming under increased pressure to be more responsible for the environment. Everything we buy, produce and use has a carbon footprint.

The carbon footprint of a product or service is the total carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases emitted during its life, from its production to its final disposal. As members of climate savers virtualDCS has pledged assist to achieve the following collective mission:

By 2012, we seek to reduce global CO2 emissions from the operation of computers by 54 million tons per year, equivalent to the annual output of 11 million cars or 10–20 coal-fired power plants. Using our platform will help us to achieve this mission.

Virtualisation is at the heart of our solution and with this we are able to reduce our energy costs and consumption by 80% compared with physical hosting. Most servers and desktops today are in use only 8-15% of the time they are powered on, yet most x86 hardware consumes 60-90% of the normal workload power even when idle.

Hosting just one server on our cloud platform could reduce the impact on the environment through an Energy Saving per year of 6619(kWh); this is equivalent to planting 20 trees, taking 2 cars off the road, and reducing your carbon footprint by 8867lbs per year.*

The production process for making servers has a carbon footprint all of its own, with consolidation factors of up to 30 to 1 on our platform; these servers no longer have to be made.

Data centres in general come under a lot of criticism for the amount of power they consume and their carbon footprint. Data centres by design require power to both power servers and drive air conditioning units to cool them, which historically used about the same amount of power again. Our data centre facility uses air conditioning unit that utilise the latest free-cooling technologies. Air is drawn into the data centre from outside and only cooled if it is above 21oc. Since we live in the UK this realises a 40% reduction in the cost of cooling our environment.

*Assumes 550Watts for a 2CPU server, 12,000 Miles per year and 20 mpg, 1341lbs CO2 emissions per kWh