These days been green can be a nice selling advantage.
I have seen that some web hosting providers has adopted a strategy
arround this and are working on carbon offsets with carbonfund.org.

Does anybody know of similar initiatives from NAC or similar datacenters?

Depends on how define being "green". Check out The Green Grid (http://www.thegreengrid.org/home). It's a global consortium of IT providers pioneering in green technology. They have a members list on their site showing all the providers / technology manufacturers that are currently members, as well as more information about the initiatives they are taking in making the IT field green.



Alex

www.rackforce.com the best of the best

We are currently looking at a scheme which will mean a single broad leaf tree will be planted for every new customer.

Cost is around £5 per tree, however when you weigh up the marketing benefits, and the actual environmental benefits its quite a promising idea.

Slightly off topic, but virtualization is green. I did the math and one of our VPS's only draws an average of 3.5w (4w peak).

We are currently looking at a scheme which will mean a single broad leaf tree will be planted for every new customer.

Cost is around £5 per tree, however when you weigh up the marketing benefits, and the actual environmental benefits its quite a promising idea.

Are you doing this yourselves or is this run by another company. It sounds like a good idea.

Big debate over in Colo Forum as to what constitutes green :D

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=665246

www.rackforce.com the best of the best

Yeah, you cant beat www.rackforce.com tbh.

A true green data center is www.aiso.net but many others use carbon credits. I know www.eliterax.com is using DTE's Green Currents program to power some of their servers.

It is hard to say. I have seen companies who claim to be "green" and only use renewable energy (http://conserveplanetearth.com) to power their data center. But these companies are simply resellers for well known companies that do not rely on only green energy sources.

Maybe one day servers will be like this? hmm

I'm gonna suggest going green in at least one sense starts with you if your going colo. The parts you choose in your own server are really key

I actually saw an advertisement for this on WHT thru Rackspace:

http://www3.webhostingtalk.com/click;h=v8/365a/0/0/%2a/y;185040089;0-0;1;19808344;3454-728/90;24224706/24242559/2;u=1;~sscs=%3fhttp://www.rackspace.com/promo/januarygreen.php?CMP=webhostingtalk_728x90_jangreen

So, 'green' will be the new 'managed' debate now? Yay!
Yeah, my DC is green man. I picked up a can of paint and just painted it green. Can't say it's not green!

Realistically, this post sums 'green' all up in a nutshell:
The term Green is a brilliantly orchestrated marketing Scam
that seems to be rooted in catholic guilt complexes.

A few months back NBC (or was it CBS, IDK) went 'all green' for 24 hours. Their version of 'all green'? Let's tell people how to conserve energy. Great, but how much energy did THEY themselves conserve? Probably not that much.

Green is good, giving back to the environment, using environment friendly materials is good, but, this is seriously going to be the next 'managed' debate here. What IS green? Each company is going to have their own definition, but the nuts and bolts are pretty simple:

A GREEN datacenter will do everything in their power to minimalize their impact on the environment. This doesn't mean planting a forest of trees (Gnax) makes a DC green, it means that they do everything to MINIMALIZE what they're doing to the environment. Replace those non green Power Supplies with Green ones. Generators? Are they 'green' Generators? Power? are you at least using SOME 'Green' power?

Personally, I think the whole concept of a "green" data centre is just a marketing gimmick. Either the data center is using renewable energy (i.e. hydro power) or not. This is not some active decision of the data centre, but simply the result of what city the data centre happens to be located in.

Beyond that, any company that claims to be green but offers any Netburst architecture CPU's (e.g. Pentium 4) is a hypocrite; this the least power efficient x86 CPU architecture ever created, and anyone in the industry should be well aware of that so stay away.

If you want to be green, just google whether the local power company for that data center's location is hydro or not, and order an Opteron HE or Xeon Harpertown server.