HostingCon Panel: Green Hosting Hope or Hype?
Thanks to Douglas Hanna for the HostingCon 2007 coverage
Room 327 | Session #103 | 2:00 - 2:45 PM
Moderator: Isabel Wang, Principal, IsabelWang.com
Panelist: Sam Fleitman, Chief Operations Officer, SoftLayer Technologies, Inc.
Panelist: Doug Johnson, Director Marketing - Hosting, SWsoft
Panelist: Dallas Kashuba, Head Honcho, DreamHost
Dallas: Felt being green was a good thing to do because of personal feelings. Added some marketing with banners.
Sam: Spare parts and amount of boxes, etc. are being reduced to be more green. More efficiency is good for green and money. They are doing the equivalent of taking 1,000 cars off the road every year. They use low voltage processors. Little things like turning off extra USB ports adds up to make big changes. Not just marketing, but also good at saving money.
Do customers appreciate it?
Sam: They don’t usually realize if it is good or bad. We want our customers to realize we are environmentally friendly, but we are in the business of selling servers.
Green Building Certification?
Sam: Heard about it, but haven’t dug into it much.
Dallas: We’ve been in a power crunch for a couple of years. We use exclusively AMD and it makes a difference power wise. You can reduce prices through being “green.”
Isabel: How do decide when to make a server green?
Dallas: We replace them with more efficient servers as they die. We don’t rip out existing servers to replace them with more efficient servers, though.
Doug (SWSoft): The green I’m talking about is taking 10 servers and making them 1 server through vitalization. It has to be marketed efficiently. When you do that, the datacenter has all of this wasted floor space. This is a simple calculation - take my 10 servers and divide it by 10. At SWSoft, we work with people who use our vitalization software to see what type of efficiency they are seeing.
Doug: Example and explanation of power savings case study. Regular server vs. virtualizes server. You need to do the right marketing because a VPS is not for everyone. Some people need an actual dedicated server.
Sam: I don’t have the numbers, so I can’t really guess. A lot of customers are leaning towards a VPS environment because of added flexibility and savings.
Isabel: Why are they asking?
Sam: I don’t know. All types of customers are asking for VPS. Some people still don’t want to get over the mental block of it just being their own server.
Isabel: What type of companies put up the Green Hosting banner?
Sam: All types of companies and sites.
Isabel: There are ~60 million results for green hosting on Google.
Sam: There aren’t many big players in the green hosting area specifically. The biggest green hosting niche site hosts like 5,000 web sites.
Audience Question: Do we need an integrity process (like certification) to say who really is green?
Sam: We’re joining the Green Grid to see what they are using and then we provide our data back to them. Other facilities are doing it as well. The Green Grid is one of the most impressive.
Dallas: If you think long term about your business, it just makes sense to use less power.
Audience question: Green power more expensive?
Sam: I think green power is 3-4 cents per KW more.
Audience question: Any local pressures (because DreamHost is in California)?
Dallas: We don’t really feel like a local company - California is just a large population, so we have more there. We aren’t seeing much local pressure. No one is really pressuring us. The building put a restriction on how much power we could use.
Audience question: How does a smaller operation (i. e. shared or just a dedicated server?)
Dallas: We try to get as many customers as possible (without causing problems) on a server, so it is harder to virtualize. We are using virtulization to isolate problem customers. We may never offer dedicated hosting again since virttulization is getting so good.
Audience member: Some real environmentalists feel that just buying carbon credits isn’t the way to go.
Sam: For Dallas, they buy credits based on their power consumption. So if they use less power, they buy less credits.
Isabel: Out of time.
July 24th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
[…] It features some web services execs talking about their experiences with “being green.” Here’s a transcription. Filed under Green Technologies by MrGreen Permalink • Print • Email […]