In March, with the promise of Summer around the corner, I was eying up my somewhat battered bicycle and contemplating last year’s resolution to actually use it to cycle to work when the weather was pleasant. Not only would it be better for me, but as the boss of a company with a serious commitment [...]
Does your business take green IT seriously? Well it should, because ignoring climate change could cost you money and harm your credibility. (originally published in .NET magazine.) There are now over 1.1 billion computers in operation worldwide, collectively producing about one billion tonnes of CO2 through their electricity requirements. E-waste is serious headache too with [...]
We recently became the first UK Web host to be Carbon Neutral accredited, but does it actually make a real difference? In fact, are we going about all this wholesome planet-saving the right way at all? As an aside, our arch-rivals over at RackSpace claimed they were the first UK Web host to be carbon [...]
“Corporate Social Responsibility”; yet another of those buzz-phrases that seems to be bandied about ever more, but there is more to it than perhaps first meets the eye and there are many ways in which socially responsible practices are good for business. What’s more, IT businesses seem ideally placed to lead the way. Many large [...]
When temperatures rise to record levels, it’s not just trains and water supplies that go wrong; all sorts of infrastructure can be affected including the Internet. Normally our data centres have plenty of over-capacity in their air-conditioning systems. Cooling a data centre is one of their big design challenges – each of our 1 metre [...]
Power is becoming ever more of an issue for data centres, and the prices keep on going up – doubling in the last two years! Not only that, but the energy ends up as heat, which then has to be air-conditioned (add another 30% to the electricity bill), and then it all just wafts into [...]