Easynet's green Rally cry

It’s a good job that the majority of our press releases arrive by email these days as if we were still back in the times when snail mail predominated then the sheer volume of missives detailing the latest green innovations by tech companies would suck up trees faster than a rotten branch through a well-greased wood-chipper.

The latest example of financial frugality dressed in the green robes of energy efficiency comes courtesy of managed network provide Easynet. The company claims to be salving the consciences of its customer base with the purchase of some new HP virtualisation kit which will make it a dramatically more efficient operation.

Easynet boasts that the new hardware will “increase IT utilisation to 85% whilst boosting energy efficiency by up to 30% and reducing the load on servers by between 30 and 60%”. The company also claims to be ‘carbon neutral’ which is an interesting assertion but one that seems unfathomably difficult to calculate. I wonder if that includes the company’s involvement with a motor-sport event – Easynet is the official networking and hosting company of the FIA World Rally Championship, as the last sentence of the press release announcing its green credentials states. Exactly how much do you have to improve your server utilisation rates by to off-set a Subaru Impreza going 90mph around a Welsh forest for a week?

I jest of course but there is a real shortage of green metrics available with which to really scrutinise the claims of tech companies hoping to be cash-in on energy efficiency. We looked into the issue recently and you can find the article here:

Crunching the numbers on data-centre efficiency

Meanwhile, Easynet’s strategy does make sense. At a time when businesses are under pressure to cut costs and be seen to be green, outsourcing the whole problem to a company which claims to be able to save you money, and save some planet, could work. (Actually the whole saving the planet thing is a bit of a misnomer. Life on earth managed to spring up despite a toxic atmosphere and not much else to go on, so it’s not the planet we should be worrying about, it can look after itself.)