Rackspace makes green move with carbon neutral managed service

Managed hosting services company Rackspace has launched a "green" carbon neutral Web hosting service that helps to offset the carbon emissions to the atmosphere produced by the powering up of its data centres.

Fabio Torlini, marketing director for the Europe, Middle East and Africa operations of Rackspace Managed Hosting, which provides totally outsourced managed hosting solutions to 3 000 companies in South Africa, the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Australia, said the company has engaged in a partnership with the International Tree Foundation.

"We have agreed to pay for the planting of a tree at a reserve in Pembrokeshire each time we buy a new server. Both existing and new customers that use us to provide and manage their Web hosting and other IT service requirements will not be affected by the payments we make for tree planting."

Torlini added that while the carbon neutral venture had originally been developed as part of the company's employee engagement programme, many customers had since made enquiries about it. "Once they knew about it, they responded with positive suggestions to improve and extend the scheme."

South African customers use the offshore Web-hosting facilities of Rackspace in the UK and so are also participating in the carbon neutral tree planting initiative. With soon-to-be-promulgated legislation, the South African government is expected to prescribe a national improvement in overall energy efficiency of 12% by 2014, a move that will reduce carbon emissions in a country that is still one of the world's highest per capita emitters of greenhouse gas CO2 (the major cause of global warming) and consumes some 40% of the total electricity generated in Africa.

Hot weather affects data centres and broadband services. Recent heat waves in the UK have resulted in problems at data centres and interruptions of broadband networks. Global warming and heat waves - temperature swings of 15-20 degrees are common in South Africa - can have severe consequences for business when data centres are affected.

Rackspace is not suggesting its programme is the total answer but rather a move in the right direction. Torlini said every tree planted by the company will offset carbon emissions generated by a server for a one-year period. "This is a good starting point and we continue to have discussions with the CarbonNeutral company to develop a more comprehensive, longer-term offsetting strategy.

"Our managed service model improves customers' energy efficiency because the hosted applications run by third-party specialists achieve higher service utilisation rates than in-house applications. We are able to run air-conditioned data centres and support desks much more efficiently than customers can run them for their own use."

Rackspace expects that its migration from Intel to AMD-based infrastructure could also lead to a reduction of energy consumption by as much as 20%.

The International Tree Foundation, a UK-based charity whose members work in their local communities to ensure the survival of woodlands, says the world needs trees because they are a "major life support system for the planet, converting atmospheric carbon dioxide back into oxygen".

Ten percent of the world's tree species are under threat of extinction as worldwide 15 million hectares of forest are destroyed every year. The ITF maintains tree planting is a way of making the world a better place now, and for generations to come.