STRATO - the second largest web host in Europe, according to its recent press release - made the announcement at the Sustain IT Conference in London, UK and says that as "one of the first European web host companies to employ The Green Grid's metrics" in its data centers, "STRATO has taken on a leading role in the industry."

"We have joined The Green Grid because we want to create a standardized label for energy efficiency in data centers," says Damian Schmidt, CEO of STRATO. "We enable the customer to consciously choose an IT service provider. The Green Grid makes energy efficiency in data centers transparent. It forces other data center operators to act. In our data centers we can scrutinize The Green Grid's metrics and exercise them in a real-time environment."

In September 2007, STRATO reported that it planned to completely cut carbon emissions at its two data centers by January 2008, turning to renewable energy resources, like hydro-electric power from the Rhine River. In its recent press release, STRATO says it has "raised the energy efficiency per customer by 30 percent" over the last 18 months.

Based in Berlin, STRATO says it hosts over 3.5 million domains and has more than 1.3 million customer contracts.

Energy efficiency is an issue that comes up frequently in the data center business, and several organizations are working to develop energy efficiency metrics and practices for the data center industry. Arguably, the most prominent among those is the Green Grid.

The Green Grid is one particular organization that seems to be making strides towards this goal through its strategic partnerships with hardware manufacturers, data center operators and government agencies, in an effort to engage the issue on all levels and create a solution that is not only efficient and cost-effective, but sustainable for the future.

In April, The Green Grid signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the US Environmental Protection Agency as well as the Storage Networking Industry Association.