London - 17 April, 2007 - Rackspace® Managed Hosting, the UK's most recommended hosting provider, today announced it has signed an agreement on a data centre that runs on environmentally friendly energy. The agreement is with property investment and development group SEGRO (Slough Estates Group). The new data centre will help to reduce Rackspace's dependency on fossil fuel as well as provide a more efficient way to manage its customers' needs.
Rackspace is currently experiencing significant year-on-year growth in the UK, driving the need for an investment in a new data centre. The site, based in Slough, will provide Rackspace with 65,000 sq foot of net technical space, with the opportunity to design the data centre to its own specifications, factoring in future growth. The data centre is expected to be fully operational in Spring 2008.
Slough Heat and Power energy centre will supply the data centre with its required 15 MVA (megavolt-amperes). Slough Heat and Power has recently been converted from running on coal to use clean wood chips and fibre fuel, both renewable biomass energy sources. Material is shredded and converted into small, odourless cubes, which are then combusted to generate electricity, hot water and steam for local businesses and residents.
Jacques Greyling, managing director at Rackspace, said: "Rackspace and its clients are increasingly looking for ways to minimise the negative impact they have on the environment. As a leader in managed hosting, we are working on a number of initiatives to offer organisations the opportunity to utilise carbon neutral hosting. This reflects Rackspace's commitment to offering Fanatical Support® to its customers by going the extra mile.
Having invested in a carbon offset scheme through tree planting, we are now looking at solving the problem at the root by sourcing renewable energy for our servers."
In June 2006 Rackspace upgraded to HP ProLiant DL385 servers featuring Dual-Core AMD OpteronTM 200 Series processors, which consume less electricity than prior server models. In October 2006, Rackspace UK began offering all of its new and existing customers the opportunity to sign up for a carbon neutral hosting package whereby Rackspace pledged to plant sufficient trees to offset the carbon produced as a result of running its customers' servers. To date over 900 trees have been planted in Pembrokeshire as a result of this initiative.
