Going Green with 5NINES

Nov 01, 2009

Remember the the three R’s from elementary school; reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic? Well, today the term has taken on a new green meaning—Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

With our communities and environment facing new challenges and threats from changing climate, depleting resources and an overburdened earth, it is urgent that we all do our part to be responsible stewards of our planet.Here’s how we are taking up the challenge at 5NINES, and we encourage you to join us and take action.

Reduce—We believe the biggest impact can be made by reducing our energy footprint, resource consumption and making informed decisions.

Power consumption—Data centers are one of the most significant sources of energy consumption. A recent EPA report to Congress estimated that U.S. servers and data centers used about 61 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2006. With data consumption and storage needs growing exponentially, servers are sipping more power than ever and requiring more cooling to offset the heat emissions. In fact, cooling accounts for almost half the energy used in data centers (including ours).

5NINES takes a proactive approach to power conservation and are always at work to reduce consumption and improve efficiencies. Our data center has hot and cold aisles to minimize hot spots and optimize heat transfer, active temperature and humidity control monitoring and adjustment, new high efficiency backup power supply systems (UPS’ with 98% conversion efficiency), and server load balancing and virtualization to manage network traffic and minimize the number of active servers.

Resource utilization—As IT departments are being asked to do more with less, managing and deploying resources becomes paramount. Server virtualization can help reduce the amount of physical hardware, reduce energy consumption, reduce heat outlay in server rooms, and free up valuable server rack space. Oh, and by the way, fewer servers also reduce the physical server maintenance for IT staff.

At 5NINES, we have been living the virtualization mantra for a while and have been realizing the benefits stated above. We have partnered with leaders vendors such as VMWare and Cisco and have certified staff to deploy virtualization in our (and our customers) infrastructure. E-mail us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) to ask us how we can help with your business more effectively manage resources through server virtualization.

Read it on-line - You can reduce paper waste by using your computer - Many newspapers and magazines are available online. Instead of buying the paper versions, you can find them on the Internet (or perhaps on your Amazon Kindle or choice of e-reader). Also remember that you should print out only what you need. Everything you print that you don't really need is a waste of paper. Instead of copying or faxing a document, how about scanning and e-mailing instead? If you have to print, use the duplex setting on the printer for printing on both sides. We have also set a goal to move to a paperless billing system. Help us achieve this goal by signing up to receive your bills via e-mail at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Green power – We are proud of the fact that we are able to offset a substantial portion of the carbon dioxide emissions from electricity use at our data center through Madison Gas & Electric’s Green Power Tomorrow program. A big thank you to the Fiore Companies for continued support of the program and enabling our business to be green powered. The cost is pennies to the dollar (or kilowatt-hours as in this case) but if that is what it takes to keep Maldives on the map, we’ll do it! We encourage you to check out the MG&E website to sign up for green power for your business.

Keep a look out for how we reuse and recycle at 5NINES in the second part of Going Green with 5NINES in our next newsletter. We’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas and actions on how your business is adopting the three R’s.