News
CloudSigma rolls out carbon-neutral cloud servers
June 2010 by Marc Jacob
CloudSigma AG has now fully implemented carbon offsetting in relation to its global operations. All customers of CloudSigma now benefit from efficient, low impact cloud computing backed up by carbon offsetting. CloudSigma’s carbon neutral cloud services are the first of their kind in the industry. The comprehensive evaluation was conducted by myclimate, the non-profit foundation based in Switzerland specialising in carbon offsetting services.
Customers of CloudSigma will automatically benefit from this offsetting scheme which has been undertaken at a company wide level. The company is fully absorbing the cost of its environmental policy, maintaining the competitive price levels that users already benefit from.
Avoid, Reduce and Offset
Completion of the carbon offsetting forms the third and final part of a ground-up strategy to build a computing platform with a low environmental impact. To do this meaningfully means building our policy into decision-making processes from the very beginning. Our choice of data centre and location in Switzerland was in no small part guided by our commitment to greener computing. Our data centre which is operated by Interxion boasts one of the highest power efficiencies in Europe for a multi-tenanct facility. Additionally Switzerland has one of the greenest electricity grids in the world. Electricity consumption is by far the biggest source of environmental impact for the company. By drawing electricity from largely low-impact generation sources we have avoided a significant amount of carbon dioxiode emissions from day one.
Using power-efficient servers we are able to achieve more computing throughput for every unit of electricity we consume compared with many other operators. The combination of avoidance and reduction has meant that the amount of carbon dioxide actually needing offsetting is much smaller than traditional hosting providers on a like for like basis.
We chose myclimate because of their non-profit foundation status and because of their commitment to projects that have a meaningful impact on sustainable development and job creation as well as pure carbon dioxide emission reduction.
Efficient computing = Economic Benefit
The price of carbon dioxide is expected to rise over the short to medium term with authorities such as the EU and the United States expected to either introduce or extend cap and trade emissions schemes. Pricing of carbon dioxide is driving increased interest in improved computing resource efficiency for both environmental and political reasons. CloudSigma has made the choice to lead the market in embracing new ways of operating that can make a significant contribution to the changes that are needed.
