If you’ve followed Rackspace for a while, you’re probably familiar with our focus on people. We believe we’ve built a world-class culture focused on living our Core Values. We take seriously the importance of giving back through our philanthropic efforts; strengthening our communities across the globe; and sharing our passion around education, technology and the arts.  But did you know that our Supply Chain is one of the highest rated in the industry? I’m not bragging…ok, yes I am. We recognize the importance of who we associate with; it is as important as what we buy - our Suppliers are an extension of our business and therefore our customers. We take pride in selecting the best.

As a publicly traded company, it’s no surprise that we have high ethical standards for Rackers in our Code of Conduct and we publicly report our financials. We think of it as pocket - yours, ours and your customers’ – that’s the basics. Where we stand apart from the others in how we empower people across the globe through our solid investments in cultivating an open cloud. All clouds are not created equal; and while computing can enable the great discoveries that can change the world, we also shoulder the responsibility to drive infrastructure efficiency while reducing our impact on the environment – all at the same time. Wow, if this were Hollywood, they’d say we were the triple threat – can act, sing AND dance.

A lot of what I’ve highlighted before is the part of what makes us the Rackspace you already know and love. So what’s different?

It’s Earth Day, so let’s talk planet: Today’s the first day we’ve publicly shared our Global Energy Policy. This is a bold move, and one not too many companies do. The policy reflects how we think about energy, one of our largest expenses and our largest source of emissions. I could talk for days about our workplaces and data centers - showcasing the features built into the places that our Rackers and our customers’ applications call home – like using 30 percent Renewable Energy worldwide.

It’s all about People, Pocket and Planet. To make sure we’re building world-class practices across our business, we have third parties come kick our tires and do deep dives. We were thrilled to be named to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index last fall, ranking us in the top 20 percent of companies in the world. That’s big stuff and feedback that tells us that we’re on the journey to greatness.

Oh, and one more thing: Wednesday will mark our Seventh Annual Green Day here at The Castle, our San Antonio headquarters. If you happen to find yourself near Walzem Road and Interstate 35 in San Antonio, drop by and see what we’re up to. “Ain’t no party like a Rackspace party” unless we’re celebrating across the globe – London and Austin will celebrate in their own special ways. Be sure to check back Wednesday to read Cara Nichols’ Green Day blog and see if you can guess which location will have live goats, along with goat cheese and goat soap; who will bring their dogs to work; and who will be sharing the day with chickens.

We only have one Earth. Happy (43^rd) Earth Day. Here’s to a million more! Let’s build a better planet…together.

Melissa
@GreenRacker
Sustainability

We believe that access to reliable and affordable energy is integral to the growth and success of our customers businesses here at the Rack. In order to make sure that’s true now and in the future, our Global Energy Policy provides the framework for how we think about energy:

• Energy Conservation: We incorporate energy conservation and efficiency into decision-making in the way we build, buy and operate.
• Renewable Energy: Our goal is to reliably and affordably power all of our operations with renewable energy.
• Advocacy: Our goal is to insure that our partners are in alignment with our goals around Energy Conservation and Renewable Energy.

Here at Rackspace, we think about sustainability holistically – and at its most basic: power is one of our largest expenses and is the largest source of our emissions. We’re helping to build a better planet – one with cleaner air for healthier kids and adults to breathe – while investing to create new sources of clean energy that will (hopefully) power our planet for years to come.

While our investment today funds Renewable Energy Credits in the US and Levy Exempt Certificates in the UK (in addition to the renewable energy available in each market from the grid), we’re evaluating more durable ways to bring more renewable energy on line.

Hey EPA, thanks for including us! Every little bit of awareness counts to get us all moving in the same direction.

This fact is worth keeping in mind amid the confusion spread lately by some writers who observe that cloud data centers consume lots of electricity and assume that’s a negative development. Rackspace uses 0.00081 percent of the world’s energy to deliver one of the most innovative and flexible cloud portfolios that provides social and economic benefits for over 180,000 customers.

Of the more than 7 billion people on the planet, 80 percent have access to electricity, 75 percent have cell phones and yet only 35 percent have Internet access. It’s an unprecedented time of global innovation and instantaneous knowledge sharing. Computing and data center companies continue to meet the demand to connect, communicate and exchange information. Innovations like the cloud are key to insuring that growth becomes more efficient.

Computing gets more efficient and specialists like Rackspace know how to do it best.

We at Rackspace think about sustainability in a holistic manner, and we want to share a few thoughts specifically about how we think about the power we use. We are specialists in driving infrastructure at scale. It’s at the core of our business.

Powering our business: every watt counts!

Rackspace is acutely aware of the cost of power. It’s one of our biggest expenses. We actively manage energy spending to drive value for customers and efficiency for our business. Every watt Rackspace uses is tracked — It came from somewhere (a power company, a generator) and it went somewhere (an office, a data center to power a server or power infrastructure). Understanding our power use helps us identify new ways to conserve resources – both natural and financial. Our Global Energy Team comprises sustainability, finance, sourcing and data center experts and sets the company strategy and policy focused on renewable energy, advocacy and efficiency.

 Investing in renewable energy

Rackspace purchases 25 percent renewable energy worldwide (and our UK data center and office are powered by 100 percent renewable energy). We evaluate existing and potential data center sites to understand our impact before we invest and built it into our long term plans. We evaluate sources of purchasing additional renewable energy and generating renewable energy to move more of our energy demand off the grid completely.

Efficiency

We continually take steps to improve energy efficiency and reduce consumption of other natural resources. Whenever possible, we select data centers in cooler climates and choose energy efficient facilities and hardware allowing us to deliver more computing performance per watt. Our recently announced data center in Australia will be among our most efficient.

When it comes to our product portfolio, our Global Infrastructure Team matches the expected workloads to the hardware and infrastructure build-outs to look at reliability and performance per watt. This approach drives efficiency throughout our operation — from building location and materials, HVAC, power distribution, containment, virtualization and compute performance per watt. Even the software that runs on machines makes each generation of computing more efficient. We expect our work with The Open Compute Project to yield additional benefits in this area going forward.

One thing that really has moved the needle for efficiency is virtualization. It lets us consolidate the work of many systems to function on fewer servers and delivers efficiencies in memory, hard drives and processors, as well as in power consumption. Our annual reports indicate that from 2009 to 2011 our total customers have grown by 90 percent but our number of servers has grown by only 41 percent.

Advocacy

Our advocacy strategy enables us to work with upstream partners and providers to continue to improve the long term outlook of reliable, affordable clean energy. We see it as a way to sustainably deliver value to our customers.

A word on generators

On-site generators provide important back-up power for our data centers, but part of our efficiency strategy is to NOT run them unless we need to. Given total costs to purchase, maintain, test and fuel them, generators are more expensive per KWH than purchasing power off the grid. They are a backup plan used by mission critical services in cities, hospitals and factories around the world in case they’re needed for short amounts of time. No one running a mission critical enterprise wants to be on backup power for very long. As a company, we track our emissions from power, generators, business travel and even the commute Rackers take to work. It’s all part of the bigger picture: emissions matter and continually driving down our intensity is an important business metric.  

Bottom line: Power is integral to our customers, we take it seriously and we manage it well.

P.S. Rackspace was also recently named to the 2012 Dow Jones Sustainability North American Indexes (DJSI), which rates the 2,500 largest companies in the Dow Jones Global Index based on economic, environmental and social performance. I’ll talk about that more in my next post.