Green Web Hosting
At Hyve, we are committed to making a positive contribution to the protection of the environment. In addition to providing carbon neutral hosting services, we are also taking further responsibility to pitch in to the preservation of the environment. Our focus on green hosting services is divided into three main areas.
Employee Environmental Protection Practices
In our day-to-day work, every effort is made to employ environmentally friendly practices. All office lights are now equipped with energy efficient bulbs and, along with all desktop PCs, are switched off each night. We are also constantly looking out for new ways in which to reduce our carbon footprint. Some more of the green friendly practices we employ are detailed below.
Telecommuting practices
All employees work from home where possible. Employees are encouraged to use 'green' transportation when travelling to and from work if essential, reducing vehicle emissions.
Focus on reusable office supplies
Paper towels have been replaced with reusable cotton towels and Styrofoam and plastic containers are not used in our primary offices reducing waste. Employees are encouraged to use mugs and other reusable drinking containers rather than disposable ones.
Recycling
We recycle all paper material used throughout our offices. In addition to this, our old computers are also recycled instead of being discarding. If we cannot utilise them ourselves, we resell them to the public.
Carbon Offsetting
The objective of Carbon offsetting is to balance out the release of carbon dioxide by our web servers and other equipment. We do this by using a combination of products, practices and resources that save more than the equivalent amount of CO2 released. We are partnering with some of the UK's leading carbon reduction and offsetting organizations - our aim is to reduce what we can and offset what we can't.
Energy Usage Reduction
As well as employee practices and carbon offsetting, we also limit our impact on the environment by using energy efficient web hosting equipment.
Low voltage Xeon processors
We use Xeon Processors that are known for their energy efficiency due to their cooling design. These processors offer 3 times higher performance per watt compared to older, more inefficient CPUs.
Power efficient DDR2 memory
Memory is responsible for consuming around 15% of data centre energy so we use power efficient DDR2 memory which offers 1.5 volt power consumption technology.
Power saving hard drives
Our hard drives consume 40% less power and 4-5 less watts than competing hard drives. Faster system readiness during re-boots is enjoyed by our customers due to less current being used during start up.
Cloud Hosting Architecture
Our enterprise Cloud Hosting platform offers considerable power saving benefits.
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Power Supplies
Each Blade server (16x Blade servers per enclosure) shares 6 power supplies, which not only offers improved redundancy, but also offers substantial power savings because only 6 PSU's are required for 16 servers (instead of 16).
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Shared Disk Arrays
By utilising state-of-the-art Fibre Channel disks with Fibre Optic connections (the fastest possible), we are able to present a group of 16 disks to multiple servers, improving both disk performance and reliability. This premium disk configuration physically reduces the number of disks required per server, resulting in a reduction of power consumption of at least 50%. This significant power reduction also translates to cooler servers which in itself provides additional carbon savings as detailed in the following section.
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Data Centre Footprint
Each Blade enclosure is substantially more compact than traditional servers, taking up just 10U of rack space for 16 servers. This would traditionally require at least 16U for the servers, plus another 16U of air space between servers for adequate cooling. This results in a significant reduction in data centre footprint and translates to lower running costs for air conditioning and a smaller carbon footprint.
