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Q&A: Con Zwinkels, LeaseWeb

In an email interview with the WHIR, LeaseWeb managing director Con Zwinkels discusses his company's "green" practices through its EvoSwitch data center, as well as the environmentally friendly efforts of the hosting and data center industries at large. By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- As environmental concerns continue to be raised within the IT industry, Netherlands-based hosting provider LeaseWeb has gone to great lengths in its eco-friendly practices.

Last year, LeaseWeb put 500 racks into use at its new carrier-independent and carbon neutral data center EvoSwitch (www.evoswitch.com). In total, LeaseWeb manages 1,500 cabinets and more than 11,000 servers located in five different data centers.

The EvoSwitch facility uses energy-saving techniques through free cooling, cold corridors, delta conversion, high frequency lighting and electricity powered by sustainable energy sources.

The company is also a member of The Green Grid (Thegreengrid.org) and actively invests in climate-neutral credits in cooperation with the Climate Neutral Group, (Climateneutralgroup.com) planting trees to offset the carbon balance

In an email conversation with the WHIR, managing director Con Zwinkels discusses Leaseweb's green practices in operating an eco-friendly data center, as well as current and future eco-friendly efforts within the hosting industry in general.

To what extent can a data center be completely eco-friendly?

Con Zwinkels: Our data center environment currently has a Power Usage Effectiveness of 1.7. For reasons of continued upsizing, this PUE has been calculated to drop to around 1.5 in coming months and even to 1.3 after the rollout of the next construction phase. Today, a PUE of 1.6 is generally thought to be the highest value that a green center can achieve. From this point of view, the PUE we are now realizing in our data center environment is very eco-friendly.

This also shows that developing and managing green hosting is a question of building towards an even greener future. In doing so, you have to compare the various new technologies, especially in the area of cooling, which will provide you with an evolving concept by means of some smart calculations and fine-tuning of the equipment. It is also important to choose realistic solutions concerning both investment costs and the actual concept.

Theoretically, you could set up a data center at the bottom of the ocean or at the North Pole (very economical in terms of cooling). This, however, means a whole new set of problems. Data center environments and water simply do not mix, and connections at the North Pole are, to put it mildly, not as good as in Amsterdam.

What has LeaseWeb done to make its own hosting environment greener, besides running an eco-friendly data center?

We offer our clients a portal that gives them information about the electricity consumption of their hosting environment. This lets them monitor and manage their energy consumption from a distance. Besides this, LeaseWeb just recently launched an environmentally friendly virtual private server platform based on VMware. Various client cases have already shown that substantial energy savings through virtualization are possible.

Virtualization substantially enhances efficiency in the hosting environment with which a server park can be reduced to a fraction of what it was and which maximizes the use of the available server space. In order to serve our clients in their virtualization needs, we additionally developed several virtualization products, such as, VMware, Xen, Virtuozzo, and Microsoft Hyper-V.

How much time and money did LeaseWeb invest in arriving at these improvements?

It took us a year to set up an environmentally friendly data center environment. In itself, this is reasonably fast, especially considering its size. But as I said before, a green data center environment is an evolving concept. This means that we are continuously studying and assessing new technologies when the green data center environment expands. Virtualization also required our organization to make quite an investment in knowledge. All in all, it is difficult to say exactly how much time we invested in our green hosting project. Although I could give you figures on how much the green data center environment cost, these extra "green" costs are negligible compared to what is being realized in terms of energy savings.

What are the attitudes among LeaseWeb's business clients towards green IT?

Especially LeaseWeb's corporate customers choose a green hosting solution because of environmental and social reasons. A fair number of corporate companies have even established these aspects in their company policy. Smaller companies often note that LeaseWeb's green hosting is a nice asset. A much more important issue for these smaller companies is, however, the rising energy consumption of their hosting environment. There are only a few SMEs that wouldn't find it appealing to reduce their energy consumption and thus improve their profits - especially considering the continually rising energy prices.

Is it possible for every web host to offer complete green practices?

Most data centers were built around the turn of the century when people were not paying as much attention to the energy consumption of hosting environments. It is impossible to turn these data centers into green data centers just like that, and writing them off would be a destruction of capital. Even so, these data centers could make cosmetic modifications to improve their eco-friendliness, such as investing in cold corridors that separate cold air from warm air. Surprisingly, however, a green approach is still not the standard approach for building new data centers, despite market expectations that the consumption of electricity by data centers will become a problem in the near future.

It might be difficult, however, for smaller hosting companies to set up completely green hosting services. A green approach requires substantial investments, not only within the data center environment but also in the expertise needed for virtualization. On the other hand, we are seeing such smaller hosting companies using LeaseWeb's green facilities for the purpose of promoting themselves as a green hosting company.



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