LONDON, 23rd April 2010 - Rackspace (www.rackspace.co.uk), the world’s leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry today announces that it has been voted as the IT Operator of the Year in the prestigious Green IT Awards.

“We’re absolutely thrilled to be recognised as IT Operator of the Year by The Green IT Awards,” said Rackspace Managing Director Brian Thomson. "We’ve worked hard not only to make our customer offering sustainable, but also introduce internal initiatives such as employee education and recycling. “We’re also very proud of our energy efficiency technology in our Slough data centre that uses energy efficient measures including dual-core AMD Opteron processors and ambient cooling technology. We plan to continue to introduce even more initiatives over the coming years and work harder than ever to be green.”

Over 75 organisations were nominated for The Green IT Awards and winners were selected by readers of the Green IT magazine and its website. The Green IT Awards are a benchmark by which IT companies are measured for environmental performance. The awards also showcase the role played by green marketing and sustainability communications in informing people about green issues, products and lifestyle choices, and provides examples of excellence and best practice in communicating sustainability and green issues.

Rackspace’s overall “green” activity is designed to support its commitment to contributing towards the larger environmental solution. The company believes that “green” activity makes business sense as well as environmental sense. Rackspace has adopted several initiatives over the past two years to help reduce its environmental impact:

• The Slough data centre (DC), designed to use energy efficient technology, provides 55,000 square foot of net technical space, and has been built to help ensure efficient use of energy. Cooling is a key element of energy use in all data centres and Rackspace has deployed ambient cooling technology
• Through International Tree Foundation (ITF), Rackspace has agreed to have a tree planted for every new customer, as a way to mitigate some of the carbon generated through its hosted servers.
• Internal initiatives promoting the use of paper from sustainable sources, recycling of aluminium cans, paper, cardboard and plastic, and the use of environmentally friendly cleaning products

Rackspace Named IT Operator of the Year at the Green IT Awards