How Clean is Your Cloud? The cleanest, period.
“How Clean is Your Cloud” asks GreenPeace in their latest effort in poking the big cloud companies to use renewable energy and efficient data centers.
The 52 page eye opening analysis of the main players in cloud computing grades their services by four key metrics:
- Transparency
- Infrastructure Siting
- Energy Efficiency and GHG Mitigation
- Renewable Energy Investment and Advocacy
The report concludes among other interesting things that three of the largest IT companies building their business around the cloud – Amazon, Apple and Microsoft – are all rapidly expanding without adequate regard to source of electricity, and rely heavily on dirty energy to power their clouds. On the other hand Google and Yahoo [and GreenQloud obviously] lead the sector in prioritizing access to renewable energy in their cloud expansion, and both have become more active in supporting policies to drive greater renewable energy investment.
The report also states that there have been increasing signs that more IT companies are beginning to take a proactive approach in ensuring their energy demand can be met with available renewable sources of electricity, and will increasingly play a role in shaping our energy future. This is certainly great news.
“In Iceland, nearly 100% of the electricity is 100% renewable from geothermal and hydropower energy sources. GreenQloud, a cloud computing service that markets itself as a green compatible alternative to Amazon Web Services, has established operations in a new data center built by Verne Global on a former NATO Air Force base in Iceland. With fast connection time to both Europe and the U.S. East Coast, Iceland’s significant renewable energy resources are attracting interest from many IT brands…”
As a key example of a pathway to a Cleaner Cloud, GreenPeace specifically named GreenQloud as the nr.1 solution to a cleaner cloud! A pleasant surprise indeed.
Our friends and data center providers at Verne Global also get a good word in (quote on the left). Verne is a huge Tier-3 data center that we recently announced as our main data center partner but they did not mention our secondary data center Thor DC. Both data centers are powered by the cleanest electricity grid in the world (the Icelandic grid).
We definately love to lead the way in sustainable and Truly Green Cloud Computing and we regularly give talks on the subject. We even created a new metric for comparing the sustainability of data centers called “Green Power Usage Effectiveness” or “GPUE” for short and GreenQloud users can see their energy statistics and avoided emissions right in the GreenQloud Dashboard.
If you also want to pioneer sustainable clean cloud computing simply Sign Up now for you very own ultra clean cloud experience!
You can also get a free 7 day trial. The link is on the front page (scroll down). We will try to make that more prominent on the site soon.
Hey Eiki,
Do you have any plans to provide x% of your Clean Cloud infrastructure free or at low cost for charities, social enterprise and more-than-profit companies? With their cost of storage and access being easily amortized over the GreenQloud as a whole, wouldn’t it make sense to promote GreenQloud in this way and also help those organisations who help others?
At Social Strategy I am doing my little bit by offering the social enterprise and more-than-profit companies I take on as clients £10,000 in free consultancy per year.
If you haven’t already, isn’t it worth considering? I know Green House Data do a similar thing.
Terence.
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