Tech Talk: Green IT Proves Profitable

By Elizabeth Wasserman

A California-based Web hosting firm discovered that energy-saving technologies, such as solar power and virtualization, helped it meet environmental and business goals.

AISO.net, based in Romoland, Calif., is an 11-year-old Web hosting company powered 100 percent by solar power. The company's Chief Technology Officer, Phil Nail, tells IncTechnology that virtualization technology helped its data center further cut energy usage and costs, consuming less than half the power of normal data center servers.

Elizabeth Wasserman: Why did AISO.net decide to go green in IT?

Phil Nail: We thought it would be a good thing to do. We've been established for 11 years. We've had our solar-power data center since 2001 and we now have customers from around the world. We power our facilities, offices, everything with solar power. We are trying to do the right thing as far as environment goes. Where we're at -- we're located in Southern California about an hour north of San Diego -- we don’t get a lot of wind, but we get a lot of sun. But as we grew the business, we had more and more demand for power. At that point, we virtualized our environment.

Wasserman: How did you convert to solar power?

Nail: The project involved installing 120 solar panels outside of our building to produce the electricity we need. We also put solar tubes in the office, which bring in natural light in the day time from around the skylights and they direct the light physically to where you want it to be. Night time we use LED lights that use 3 watts of power each. If we light the building naturally, we won't have to run fluorescent lights, which need more power. Our air units are specifically designed for what we're doing. Because we are virtualized, we don't have all the hardware that other big data centers do.

Wasserman: How did you virtualize your data center?

Nail: We physically eliminated a lot of our servers. We had a lot of clients who would have dedicated servers here. They would pay for dedicated servers. Then we virtualized with VMware and now we don't have a whole bunch of individual servers running that generate electricity and heat. We’re also using IBM virtualization technology and IBM System x3650 servers to optimize our data center. We're running on average between 50 to 75 virtual servers on one physical server. That decision came about as they business started to grow. We found that our power needs were going to be a problem. At that point, we looked at virtualization two years ago and implemented a year and a half ago.

Wasserman: What have the results been in terms of energy costs and customers?

Nail: It's a lot more efficient. It's definitely energy efficient. It's also more redundant than having all these physical servers and more secure. It doesn't generate as much electricity and it doesn't have the same heat output as before. Your energy footprint is cut way back because you're not using all those servers. At least, at a minimum we've seen a 60 percent savings in energy costs by virtualizing. As for customers, they love it. We get clients from all over the world finding us because of what we're doing and the fact that we are the only fully solar power data center out there.