Green Hosting Solutions from Rackspace

Rackspace® takes the environment seriously and has several initiatives towards making our own company greener and reducing our carbon footprint, which in turn helps make our customers become greener too. Our initiatives are wrapped into Greenspace.

Initiatives include carbon offsetting as well as reduction in the first place, by using the most power efficient hardware as well as building new facilities which utilise the latest power efficient technologies.

While Rackspace doesn't claim to have the absolute answer, we are committed to contributing our part toward the larger picture. It's going to take industry leaders like Rackspace to step up and admit there are much more environmentally friendly ways of doing things.

We were recently rewarded winning the Green IT Operator of the Year award in the Green Business Awards

Carbon Offsetting

Rackspace became one of the UK's first hosting companies to offer greener hosting solutions through tree planting in October 2006 when it partnered with the ITF, the world's longest standing tree planting charity. So far Rackspace has planted over 11,000 trees in the UK. We have filled three sites in the UK (two sites in Pembrokeshire, Wales and one in Chesham, Buckinghamshire) we are now on our third UK site in Sutton where we plant around 1,000 trees per year. As of 2011 we are also supporting community forestry in Africa where in only 6 months we have already funded the planting of 10,000 trees in Kenya. In turn this project enables Rackspace customers to lower their own carbon footprint through tree planting, which mitigates the carbon generated through the servers.

Data Centre Technology

Rackspace's green initiative is about more than just tree planting, other projects include the utilisation of a data centre, opened in June 2008, that utilises the latest power efficient technology such as power efficient cooling, utilising the cooler outside air temperature where possible.

Power efficient Hardware

Rackspace also uses energy efficient Dell AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon servers which have low voltage processors, SFF hard drives and DDR2 memory, meaning they consume less power than prior server models.

Recycling

Rackspace also has a significant recycling initiative in the office, using only paper from sustainable sources and recycling all aluminium cans, paper, cardboard and plastic through both the local council and a company called PaperRound. In 2006 Rackspace recycled 2,130 kg paper and 185 kg cans and plastic bottles saving the equivalent of 25 trees and 10,900 kWh of energy.

In addition Rackspace only uses environmentally friendly cleaning products.