Racklabs - Thoughts on the Hosted IT Revolution

Green Gone Wild

Rackspace recently joined the Green Grid as a contributing member. The Green Grid is a nonprofit consortium of IT companies whose mission is to improve energy efficiency in datacenters around the world.

The Green Grid is just in its infancy. Only two weeks ago, I attended the Green Grid’s first technical summit in Denver with Rackspace’s chief datacenter engineer. The membership roster of the Green Grid is comprised of a list of companies that reads like the NASDAQ-100. It includes most of the vendors whose equipment ends up in our datacenters. Cisco, HP, Dell, EMC, VMware, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Brocade…the list goes on…

And then there’s us… Rackspace is a bit unique among this group. We’re contributing as a substantial user of energy, rather than an equipment manufacturer. Part of the mission of RackLabs is to design and develop innovative technology to drive greater efficiency in our own datacenters, so joining this group was a no brainer. Now we have a way to work directly with our vendors and partners in our efforts and make progress that we certainly couldn’t have made on our own.

I believe the Green Grid is a great concept, it’s got all the right members participating, and I have high hopes that this group will come up with some meaningful benefits for datacenter efficiency and the environment overall. Stay tuned.