Live Earth Gets Green Datacentre

By Greg McNevin

July 10, 2007: With Live Earth making headlines around the world, much has been said about the event’s green philosophy and how it can possibly hope to offset its own environmental impact.

The organisers have naturally gone with green options whenever possible, such as renewable energy for the venues and the musician’s amps, and an attempt at complete carbon neutrality. However, when it comes to its online presence, the event has gone beyond being just carbon neutral, and utilised a far more green aware hosting provider than usual.

AISO claims to be the world’s first and only solar-powered data centre. With network and hardware equipment powered by 100 percent solar energy, the company was naturally selected by the organisers of Live Earth to host the event’s web site.

Based in Romoland, California, AISO’s data centre has been designed from the ground up to take advantage of environmentally friendly technology, and is an example to businesses worldwide to just how effective going green can be. The firm uses solar tubes to bring in natural light from the outside during the day, and makes extensive use of AMD Opteron powered blade servers instead of traditional rack mounts claiming they use sixty percent less energy and generate fifty percent less heat.

“AISO.Net chose IBM and AMD over the other major vendors because of success with IBM’s hardware, the open and highly-available design of BladeCenter and excellent customer service,” says Phil Nail, technology manager for AISO.Net. “We can run the Live Earth Web site on IBM BladeCenter and get great performance without having the power draw we would have had with rack servers.”

The company says that it is planning to go beyond its current green commitments by enhancing its datacentre with new carpeting made from recycled content, replacing all of its Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs with LED lighting, repainting the building using only LEED certified paint and installing an underground grey water tank that will provide for outdoor landscaping.

“AISO is proud to support Live Earth, a groundbreaking event to support a vital cause. We are doing everything we can do to be totally responsible and being the industry leader in environmental Web hosting,” says Nail.

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