LEED versus PUE

At ServInt, we take our commitment to the environment very seriously. If you read the ServInt Source you’ve seen me periodically write on our green initiatives, and I am happy to report that some of the efforts our industry is making seem to be having a positive effect. EPA predictions of data center power usage made back in 2007 have not come to pass. This is in no small part due to increased efficiencies in data centers and server technology.

It is perfectly reasonable for people to be skeptical of green initiatives in data centers. The phrase “lipstick on a pig” is practically custom-built to describe data center efficiency initiatives. Energy consumption is a growing environmental and geopolitical problem, and data centers just plain use an incredible amount of energy. But let’s get real – if something new gets built these days and it creates jobs and commerce around it, the chances are good that it’s either Internet based or has a large Internet component. That requires infrastructure. And for those of you thinking that ‘the cloud’ is going to solve all that I hate to burst your bubble, but ‘the cloud’ is still computers plugged into power outlets living in a datacenter, just like before. And an incredible number of additional computers are getting added every second.

So since data centers aren’t going anywhere and are just getting bigger, it’s better that infrastructure folks focus on efficiency and on doing what they can to make their footprint as small as possible. But how do customers know their servers are housed and powered in facilities as Green as hosting providers promise?

When people think of green initiatives in data centers within the United States they usually think of the LEED program, run by the U.S. Green Building Council.  LEED stands for “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design”. The USGBC people who run LEED have done a great job of getting their names out there, and you see a lot of building projects these days that tout Silver, Gold & Platinum LEED building projects.

USGPC does some great work, but people have started using LEED certification as shorthand for whether data centers are ‘green’ or not, and that’s really a mistake.  LEED programs have historically only certified new construction. So if you’re building a brand new data center, LEED is great and provides a set of guidelines to aspire to, but if your servers are housed in a facility that was retrofitted as data center space—as many data centers are—then LEED certification does not apply. USGBC is trying to fix this with their LEED for Existing Buildings rating system, but LEED-EB only works for certain types of buildings and ends up being—along with LEED as well—fairly process- rather than results-oriented.

Simply put, LEED is a set of green building best practices, but does not measure the actual environmental impact of the data center after it is up and running. That’s why I don’t tend to pay attention to LEED, as cool as it is. Instead I go straight to the PUE number for a data center space and the efforts taken to lower that number.

PUE stands for Power Usage Effectiveness and was developed by an organization called The Green Grid.

PUE is a results-oriented metric that quantifies how efficient a data center is when it comes to cooling and infrastructure. And aside from the electricity used directly to run the servers, when we’re talking about power usage in a data center, we’re talking about cooling.

We get asked whether we’re LEED certified in our data centers. We’re not, simply because our data centers are housed in facilities that predate LEED. But a good PUE-optimized data center in a repurposed building can trump a Gold certified datacenter if it’s done right. This is part of the reason we have partnered with Coresite for our main private data center builds in Northern Virginia, DC, and LA. Every Coresite facility maintains a low PUE number with some as low as 1.3.

There’s nothing wrong with LEED, it just doesn’t measure everybody. And it’s an indicator of process, not results. For results you need to ask about PUE.

Photo by Wonderlane

ServInt’s New Data Center and Our Green Commitment

We just announced the opening of our newest data center, and as I write this, I’m looking at some pictures of the new facility. Next to these are some other photos of trees being planted. We just completed our 2011 carbon footprint reassessment and have upped our commitments to reforestation through our partners at American Forests.

There’s something funny about seeing pictures of trees being planted next to shots of our new data center in Reston, VA: on the one hand, I’m looking at tender young saplings lovingly held and planted in the soil; on the other, I see stark, white walls, massive industrial cooling units, and rows and rows of server racks.

By the visual alone, you might think that data center space is the most un-Green part of a hosting company’s operation. And while this can be true for a company without a serious commitment to the environment, choice of data center facility and build-out has some of the greatest Green potential of anything we do. That’s one of the reasons we chose to build out our private data center the way we did.

In previous posts, I’ve gone into detail about how the server hardware choices ServInt makes have a huge impact on decreasing our carbon footprint. This is true now more than ever. As a basic example, in the last five years the number of cpu cores we can pack into a single rack of data center space for about the same price has multiplied roughly five-fold while the power consumption and cooling needs for that same rack have remained constant. (And this example does not even factor in the increased processing power of each core!) Committing to purchasing and deploying this new, more efficient hardware greatly reduces out power-to-customer ratio and keeps our carbon footprint in check.

But hardware is just one step. As we maximize the processing power in a rack, we also have to efficiently house and cool that rack. This is where the design of a datacenter really plays into shrinking our carbon footprint. As a general rule, the power required to cool and house servers is typically equal to 30 to 50 percent of the power needed to simply run those servers. Once you’ve picked your hardware platform, keeping the electrical requirements of cooling and infrastructure down is a central Green goal for environmentally sensitive hosts.

In most circles, air conditioning is not simply the punching bag of the Green movement, it is the devil itself. Nothing captures the essence of un-Green like the notion of cooling the interior of a building by literally pumping heat into the outside air… using fossil fuels… and leaving the windows open. But in intelligently designed, purpose-built data centers, we’re talking about well insulated, windowless rooms that are far more efficient than normal office or residential space. Still, when these rooms are filled with servers they can demand more than 40 times the cooling as the same amount of space in a typical residential home. There is simply no other way to keep servers from literally melting down than blasting cold air at them. Our business is hosting, but our byproduct is heat.

The modern data center facility helps greatly in minimizing the build-up of heat and efficiently removing it. From hot and cold aisles and forcing air directly to racks under raised floors to huge heat exchangers that tap into the cold air on a winter day and smart cooling units that are adaptive and work in sync to spool up or down as needed throughout a facility, engineers have come up with some downright ingenious solutions to efficiently deliver cold air to hot servers. And all these improvements have one goal: to reduce the electricity it takes to keep those cpu cores cool.

All of these and many other factors went into our decision about what type of new data center we would open. And they are just a few of the elements of our much larger Green Hosting Initiative, including the trees American Forests is continually planting to offset the carbon we cannot reduce directly.

If you’d like to see some pictures of our datacenters or some of the tree planting we have sponsored in recent years, check them out in our photos section on Facebook.

ServInt Nominated for an NVTC Green Award

At ServInt, we’ve made no secret of our efforts to reduce our carbon footprint. Whether it’s our regular equipment recycling, the ongoing retrofitting of more efficient and environmentally friendly equipment, 110% carbon offsetting policy, or our corporate patronage of American Forests, you certainly can’t say we’ve been standing idly by.

That’s why we’re honored to have been nominated by the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) for it’s annual Green Award.

With that being said, we obviously don’t do this for the awards. We’ve always tried our best to identify and minimize the damage our industry does to the environment. When we first set out to tackle our ongoing green initiative, we took a long, hard look at our infrastructure, our software, our hosting platform, and our facilities. Putting a dent in our carbon footprint meant more than simply buying more energy-efficient hardware, it also meant reengineering our software to increase the performance of our products without increasing the number of resources they consume.

The result is more — and better — performance for our customers, less cooling and energy costs for us, and a healthier planet for everyone. It truly is a win-win situation.

We’ve been a member of the NVTC for years, and as the Northern Virginia/Washington, DC Metro area has expanded, so have we. We’d like to give a warm thank you to the NVTC for nominating ServInt.

In the meantime, as we continue to grow we’ll keep doing whatever we can to build a greener future for all of us.

Good Provisioning is Good Business

Hi, I’m Brian Loomis, ServInt’s New Director of Provisioning and all-around nice guy — and my team and I are the foundation of the company.

No, seriously.

See, as Director of Provisioning, I lead a team of brilliant men and women who are responsible for managing, maintaining, and yes, provisioning, all of ServInt’s servers, data centers, and the facilities that house them.  Whether it involves choosing the location of a new data center or retrofitting our infrastructure to reduce our carbon footprint, it’s my department that makes it happen.

I started at ServInt as a member of the Managed Services Team in 1998, was promoted to management a few years later, and eventually moved into our Engineering Department before being tapped to head Provisioning.  As a result, I’ve been intimately involved in nearly every technical facet of this company. That experience has given me — and by extension my team — tack-sharp focus on our role within the company.

So, now that you have a general, sky-high view of what it is me and my team do day-to-day, what does “provisioning” actually entail? Read on to find out!

Read more

Intelligent Offsets: Planting Our Way to A Cleaner Planet

This week, all of us at ServInt are proud to celebrate Earth Week. While environmental protection is always on our mind, this week gives us the opportunity to focus on our actual accomplishments and lay out a strategy to take it one step further.

Planting the Seed

Earlier this month, ServInt completed its reforestation goals for the first quarter of 2010. Our goal is to not only be carbon neutral, but to be carbon positive. In our case that meant that we would go from offsetting 110% of our VPS line’s carbon emissions to 110% of our entire inventory across product lines. This year, amid our rapid growth in the DC area and our expansion to the West Coast, we plan to do it again.

Now, we know that offsets are a controversial topic for some. Many offsets are vague with labyrinthine paths to the sources and companies they claim are actually delivering renewable energy. We know there are issues with the efficiency of many of these organizations, whether the funds one donates are being used to effectively advance clean energy or whether the funds are getting lost in administration.

But we had to do something. Having been in business for more than 15 years, our customers expect premium performance. That requires the best pipes in the world, and there are few places with better connectivity than the Washington, D.C. metro area and the Los Angeles metro area. Instead of building a cheap warehouse and laying fiber out in the middle of nowhere, the nature of our business required us to build our data centers where the traffic is and that meant building in urban areas.

For months, we exhaustively researched where to purchase offsets and from whom. We  didn’t want to throw money out into the ether and claim we were helping the planet. We wanted accountability, efficiency, and a partnership with an organization that was actually doing good.

A Growing Company, In More Ways Than One

ServInt is an official corporate patron of American Forests.

ServInt, along with companies as distinguished as Ikea, Mcdonalds, Paul Mitchell, and Coca-Cola, offsets its carbon emissions by planting trees that, over time, gobble it back up. As we mentioned before, we offset 110% of the carbon emissions of our entire product line on top of our ongoing integration of more energy efficient equipment and our development of software to aid us in pursuit of staying carbon positive!

American Forests has a Four Star rating from Charity Navigator in both its Organizational Efficiency (the percentage of its revenue that is used for its mission as opposed to administrative costs) and its Organizational Capacity (its ability to grow effectively).

ServInt is a company that cares about the planet. We have a reputation to uphold, and as such we are proud to partner with American Forests for the third year in a row!

Click here to learn more about American Forests.

Photo by gilderic.