As part of our ongoing Greenspace initiative, Rackspace recently completed its third annual Green Survey, which polled customers about their environmental strategies. We sliced and diced the results, compared answers to previous surveys, and you can now access the full report here.

We were especially curious to see if being green was a key factor in business initiatives and purchase decisions, especially in this rough economic climate as compared to the last two years. While a majority of survey respondents positioned cost as a more important factor than being green, it is interesting to note that many IT cost-cutting efforts have inherently produced green benefits. For example, thirty-one percent of respondents had undertaken datacenter consolidation, which could be seen as both a cost savings and environmentally friendly initiative.

As I see it, it makes sense that cost-cutting initiatives, such as server consolidation, yield efficiencies and a significant reduction in power consumption. In general, hosting servers in larger datacenters reduces power consumption and environmental impact through scale efficiencies, but there are opportunities to reap even greater benefits if you add in virtualization and cloud computing. Using these technologies is growing in popularity for companies who want to consolidate computing while reaping environmentally and budget friendly benefits.

The survey shows there is a big opportunity for education around the green benefits of cloud computing. A new question was added to this year’s survey asking Rackspace customers whether they viewed cloud computing as a greener alternative to traditional computing infrastructure. Twenty-one percent agreed that cloud computing was a much greener alternative, while thirty-five percent were not yet convinced on its green benefits.

Overall, while cost may outweigh green benefits in the decision making process, the survey shows that a majority of companies are still concerned with green initiatives and are sustaining or improving their environmentally friendly policies. More interesting findings from the survey include:

• Half of the companies polled last year which had begun taking steps towards being green have made significant steps toward being green this year.

• Only twenty-one percent have put their green initiatives on hold.

• Seventy-one percent of respondents said they use traditional methods of environmental sensitivity such as recycling.

Let us know about your own experiences. How has your company balanced shrinking budgets with being environmentally responsible?

Last Friday, over 500 people attended the Rack’s 3rd Annual Green Day. This year’s Green Day was open to the public, so attendees included community members as well as Rackers. With over 40 “green” organizations, a farmers market and the opportunity to test drive an electric Porsche, hybrid Lexus, and hybrid Toyotas, Green Day was an opportunity for the community to learn about the environmentally friendly options San Antonio has to offer.

List of great vendors included:

Imagine Lavender Farms
The Nature Conservancy
San Antonio Water System
CPS Energy Windtricity
Bantai Civet Coffee
San Antonio Botanical Gardens

Click here to read the San Antonio Express-News article on Green Day.

See below to view our Green Day video!

Erik Carlin wrote a great post on the Mosso blog comparing the cloud storage offerings from Rackspace (Cloud Files) and Amazon (S3). Here’s a quick excerpt:

The cloud is advantageous for many reasons and both Rackspace/Mosso and Amazon offer cloud storage solutions.  We are frequently asked to compare Cloud Files enabled with Limelight’s CDN with S3 and CloudFront.  Many of the questions we are asked revolve around cost and performance (particularly CDN).  These are very quantifiable metrics so I thought I’d share with you the results of some comparative analysis we’ve done.

Read the entire post here: A Quantitative Comparison of Rackspace and Amazon Cloud Storage Solutions

Rackspace just completed its second ‘Green’ week. A year ago, Rackspace launched Greenspace, a proactive campaign to address the issues of power consumption and efficiency, carbon emissions, and general environmental responsibility.

Since then, we’ve come out with products like the Green Server configuration (utilizing the most energy efficient hardware, with all of the carbon usage offset through NativeEnergy). We’ve begun offering cloud hosting through Mosso and virtualization. And most notably, our new data center in Slough is run completely on renewable energy.

So what was Green Week?

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Our Greenspace initiative is an umbrella for all of our environmental and efficiency programs at Rackspace and one of the key areas of focus within Greenspace is data center efficiency. In May of last year, I posted an article over on the Rack Labs blogabout Rackspace joining an industry consortium called The Green Grid. The Green Grid was launched in February 2007 and today has over 150 members. The primary mission of GG is to advance energy efficiency in data centers around the world and as Rackspace is a big believer in running efficient data centers, it made a lot of sense for us to participate in this forum. We joined the group as a contributing member in March of last year and we’re proud to be one of the few hosting companies on the membership roster.

A couple of weeks ago, Troy Toman and I attended The Green Grid Technical Forum in San Francisco. This was the largest gathering so far for any Green Grid conference. In attendance were GG members, the press and industry analysts, governmental policy makers, end users, and members of other green energy constituencies. At this event, the GG presented a progress report of what we’ve been working on over the last year.

Here’s the punch line: There are no silver bullets for operating a green data center. In fact there is not even a good definition of what a green data center is yet. There is no one correct answer, no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, and no simple technology solution to make data centers become magically efficient overnight. It will take focus and hard work to get more efficient but the good news is, as evidenced by the attendance level at the conference, that there are lots of folks working toward the goal. (read more…)