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?

We’d Like to Introduce the Newest Racker on the Block: Andy Schroepfer,VP of Strategy

What’s he up to @Rackspace?
Making Fanatical Support ® tangible for customers. Andy’s goal is to quicken the pace that businesses see, and act on, the reality that the future of computing is not about servers, but about service. He calls this the Road to ACE (All Cloud Enterprise), where ACE is a business that operates powerfully without servers, by leveraging the most efficient hosting platform (dedicated or cloud) for their custom apps and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) applications for the rest.

Area of expertise:
Andy has been the go-to analyst in the hosting industry since its inception in the late 1990s. This began at Piper Jaffray where he covered the fiber network service providers such as Level 3 to Global Crossing and Exodus. Then, at Goldman Sachs, he led coverage of the hosting industry including the IPOs of Equinix, Loudcloud (now HP), and Webex (now Cisco). In late 2000, Schroepfer founded, and later sold, Tier 1 Research, the leading specialist research firm on the hosting and data center industry whose insights and data remain best-of-breed.

Claims to fame:
He was the youngest Vice President at Goldman Sachs where he was a Senior Equity Analyst covering the Internet infrastructure services industry.

Why he likes being a Racker:

Twitter:
Reach Andy on Twitter: @shrepfur (which is a phonetic spelling of his last name)

Fun facts:
Andy really believes Thursday and Friday of March Madness should be a national holiday. He also thinks best in the office when he is holding a golf club, (which is strange since he has a 29 handicap).

Rackspace is tickled to welcome GitHub to the Rackspace fold! In a few weeks, GitHub, an innovative web-based service for software projects using the Git revision control system, will be fully migrated over to their new home at Rackspace. Looks like GitHub is as excited as we are, check out their blog post on the move and the top highlights as to why they are coming over.

The Rackspace family just got bigger! Shopify.com, a premier hosted e-commerce solution provider, is now using Rackspace to service its IT requirements and the needs of its merchants. Read all about it in their latest press release.

Some awesome stuff has been happening at The Rackspace Cloud in the past few months with the latest being the development of an iPhone app. The application allows you to easily and quickly administer your Cloud Servers on the go, wherever you are. While it’s not a complete replacement for our browser-based control panel or APIs, it does allow for some powerful remote administration capabilities. For all the details, check out the blog post from The Rackspace Cloud.