Our data center is environmentally friendly in design. It is completely steel framed with no wood at all except for the door frames on the interior of the building. Our walls are over 12 inches thick and filled with insulation that has recycled content. We built our green data center, network and servers from the start to use the lowest amount of energy possible using the latest green design techniques, no other hosting company can do what we do without starting from scratch. Plus we are powered by the sun, water, and air, now that is something you can’t find anywhere else.
- Redundant Bandwidth provided by PAETEC, Cogent and Time Warner
- Redundant Cisco 7200 VXR series routers
- Redundant Cisco ASA 5500 series firewalls
- Redundant SOURCEfire Snort 3D Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS)
- Redundant Cisco Catalyst 4500 series Gigabit switches
- Redundant Packeteer packet shapers
- Redundant Network Cards in all servers
- Redundant Power Supplies in all servers
- Redundant AMD Opteron powered IBM servers
- Redundant Clustered NetApp SAN (storage area network)
- Redundant Backup Servers
- Redundant APC Network Line Conditioners
- Redundant, Fault Tolerant Web & E-mail Servers running in VMware
There are many data centers and hosting companies who claim to operate ‘green’. The only thing that counts in a data center, however, is the Power Usage Effectiveness . A data center may buy green power, but that does not make its energy usage low. A data center may install Hot/Cold Aisles, but that does not necessarily result in the best possible energy saving. The PUE of a data center is the key figure that shows how green a data center actually is. AISO’s PUE is 1.14 where as most data centers in the US according to the EPA have PUE’s of 2.0 to 3.0.
To save energy we use virtualization that allows us to replace individual physical servers and replace them with “virtual machines,” increasing the physical servers efficiency and shrinking our data centers’ server footprint, cooling needs and electricity usage. AISO servers are running AMD processors, which use less power and generate less heat, within VMware’s virtualization technology to reduce cooling and electrical requirements with a 40:1 ratio of virtual servers to physical servers. We also use NetApp SANs with Deduplication to allow our physical storage and power requirements to be reduced by more then 50%.
We also purchase AMD powered IBM BladeCenter servers, which consume less then half the power of normal data center servers. Fourteen of the regular 625 watt servers consumes 8,750 watts, where as fourteen comparable blade servers only consume 3,990 watts, that is 285 watts per server. Using blade servers also results in less heat, and therefore, less power spent on server room cooling. For more information on the blades and the IBM BladeCenter with AMD processors AISO uses, click here.
