Is your Data Center “Green”?

Is everyone really going “green”, or has the term just turned into a marketing gimmick?

It seems like every time I turn around, another company is claiming to be “green”. While a lot of these claims may be true, I have a feeling that the term “green” is not used properly. Wanting to improve our environment is one-thing, but truly making an effort to do so is another.

EarthLink is making that effort. We are aware of the issues the environment faces and we have made a conscious decision to do our part. As a data center services provider, power consumption is a major component of service delivery. When building the new data center, the leadership team took great care in ensuring that our power utilization would be consumed in the most efficient and “green” manner possible. We are committed to being one of the most energy efficient data centers in western NY as well as one of the pioneers in implementing real time PUE monitoring.

To measure the efficiency of a data center, the industry uses a metric known as Power Usage Efficiency (PUE). PUE is the ratio that represents the total power coming into a data center divided by the amount of power used by the servers. We have created a PUE Green Meter that calculates the efficiency of our data center in real time utilizing a network of revenue grade power meters. Having installed these power meters on all of our equipment, we are able to use this tool to constantly tune our systems, enabling us to run the data center as efficiently as possible. As we continue to optimize our systems and run the data center more efficiently, we are reducing our power consumption, which, in turn benefits our clients. All of our data center customer’s power is metered, so they only pay for the power they use. Through a customer portal, they have the ability to view their real time power usage. Using this data, they are able to tune their systems to run more efficiently resulting in lower power consumption equating to additional cost savings.

Implementing the Green Meter is only the first step in our efforts to becoming a “greener” organization. As we continue to grow, there are plans in place for the construction of new data centers. As we build out, we will stay true to our commitment of being one of the most energy efficient data center services providers in the region.