Facebook open-sourcing PUE dashboards

As part of their OpenCompute initiative, Facebook is now also open-sourcing the code for their dashboards to report PUE and WUE of their data centers. Rackspace is also leveraging this code to report on numbers from their data centers. You can view this in action for FB's Prineville Data Center to get a sense for its capabilities. This could be an interesting direction for all cloud companies to disclose real time efficiency numbers for their operations. As discussed recently, not all internet and cloud companies are created equal when it comes to carbon footprint...

Green internet

With much of our lives moving online, we need to become more conscientious of how our clicks are powered. While some leaders already consume only renewable energy sources to provide their services, others are stuck in the dirty world of fossil fuels. Greenpeace has issued a report analysing the current state of the internet and calls out several green internet innovators such as Google green, Apple's Environmental Responsibility or recently Facebook. This has not always been the case and Greenpeace has run targeted campaigns to pressure these players into becoming more responsible of their power-related emission footprint. You can take action to move more internet players into this direction. As the report states "Six major cloud brands – Apple, Box, Facebook, Google, Rackspace, and Salesforce – have committed to a goal of powering data centers with 100 % renewable energy and are providing the early signs of the promise and potential impact of a renewably powered internet."

We can also see this in the world of enterprise applications. SAP has announced to power all their data centers and offices with 100% renewable energy. And of course, Workday has been doing this since 2008 and going forward as a 100% green power purchaser! Going forward Workday is using a blend of Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) and Verified Emission Reductions (VERs) to achieve carbon neutrality for our power consumption.

Google expands purchase of green power in Africa and Europe

In two separate deals in the last two weeks, Google has increased its investment in green power to source its vast electricity needs for data centers. 

After signing a 10-year deal with a South-african solar power plant, they closed also a 10-year deal with a Swedish onshore windfarm (72 megawatts) to power their Finnish data center. The best thing about this is that they specifically looked for a net new green energy opportunity to ensure their funding would add additional positive impact rather than purchasing from existing sources. This engagement secured the funding to even begin with the wind farm.

This adds to their existing $1bn portfolio of green energy investments. Well done, Google!

Greenpeace pranks Amazon to be green

Greenpeace has begun to look into the clean energy reality of some of the largest IT companies with their "Clean the Cloud" initiative and recently published a clean cloud report. To improve their carbon footprint, they also successfully applied pressure to Facebook with their "No more coal" campaign and authored this amusing video. Facebook has since responded with a new commitment to clean energy and located their most recent data center in Sweden.

In the last week Greenpeace has also pranked Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is running a tremendous amount of hardware in the cloud. Some estimates say it is up to 500,000 servers.  But what are these servers powered by? In order to start the conversation Greenpeace put up a "green AWS" website falsely claiming clean powered services. The background is an interesting comparison: The big players have different levels of transparency, commitment and actual reality of renewable energy.

While Workday is nowhere near the size of the big players in terms of server count, it is good to know that we have a 100% clean power commitment through the purchase of RECs. While Greenpeace cites numerous more directly impactful options, our current use of colocation providers and the comparatively smaller number of servers makes RECs for now the best available option to mitigate emissions.