Corporate Social Responsibility
In the last decade across the world datacentres have become huge consumers of power, and even simple web sites can have a very real carbon footprint. Network EQ are aware of the impact that our operations have on the environment and from the first server we bought in 2006, we have been actively seeking to reduce our energy usage and associated carbon footprint.
These are some of the improvements we have made over the last few years:
- Our primary data centre site, Telstra’s London Hosting centre, is powered by renewable energy.
- Since 2007 we have been using virtualisation to consolidate our hardware, using Citrix XenServer to offer some of the most powerful virtual servers on the market. We generally achieve consolidation ratios in excess of 15 virtual servers to one physical host machine, and have migrated a number of customers away from power-hungry dedicated solutions with other providers onto fully-virtualised solutions whilst improving performance, security and availability.
- More recently we have been using technologies such as deduplication on our NetApp Storage Area Network and virtualisation concepts within our Juniper networking equipment to consolidate both storage and networking equipment.
- Energy consumption is a key requirement when selecting new hardware. In 2008 we made the decision to switch exclusively to Intel’s low-power Xeon CPUs on new servers, which can have less than half the power of the most demanding models. This comes with no compromise in processing power or cost, as the increased initial purchase price is paid for in energy usage reductions over the life of the server.
- We have been quick to bring new low-power solutions to the market, such as Citrix’s new virtualised load balancer, NetScaler VPX.
