(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Iceland-based Greenqloud (www.greenqloud.com) claims it will be the first truly green cloud hosting service on the market when its service enters beta in the fourth quarter of this year.
The company says its cloud is powered entirely by renewable geothermal and hydro power energy out of local data centers, making it the first cloud to be powered entirely by renewable energy.
Based on Cloud.com’s KVM-based stack, Greenqloud is a public-cloud clone of Amazon’s Amazon Machine Image, which allows EC2, EBS and S3 users to switch to GreenQloud without making any changes.
Since Greenqloud is located between Europe and North America, it has the potential to deliver hosting and storage to both markets from a single place across multiple high speed fiber connections to Iceland.
Additionally, Iceland’s abundance of affordable clean energy and data center space ensures that Greenqloud can charge the same rate as, or a lower rate than, its cloud competitors.
So far, the startup has raised about a half a million dollars from Iceland-based angel investors and is hoping to acquire more funding to bring the service to wider availability.
In an email interview with the WHIR, Greeqloud CEO Eirikur Hrafnsson discussed the green cloud service and how it differentiates itself from other hosting providers using clean energy.
WHIR: Why would customers choose Greenqloud over another cloud service?
Eirikur Hrafnsson: Multiple reasons spring to mind. First, Greenqloud is the only completely carbon neutral cloud provider. We use geothermal and hydro power from a 100 percent reliable and modern power grid. Customers may have many reasons why this is important to them besides the obvious environmental issues, for example, avoiding carbon taxes and buying offsets, improving their company image and having stable energy prices by not depending on fossil fuel. Second, you save money if you are targeting both North America and Europe because you only need one location. Files in Amazons S3 don’t get copied across borders, with Greenqloud you are equally as close to North America and Europe with our low latency and redundant multi-terabit fiber cables. Third, more variety of VM options and the first public cloud to support the same APIs as Amazon (EC2,S3,EBS) so it’s easy to switch or to scale out. Fourth, high performance infrastructure with Infiniband fabrics. Fifth, clustered file system as a service. Sixth, peering with university networks. Seventh, Greenqloud will have competitive pricing. It is NOT a premium service.
WHIR: Greenqloud claims that it is the world’s first truly green public compute cloud. Who do you see as being your closest competitors?
EH: In terms of the environmental factor we are the only truly green cloud. There are other players in Europe starting to market themselves as green clouds but by leveraging carbon offsets which will make them more expensive and not truly green. There are no “green clouds” in the US that we know of. In terms of general competition, we are after both North American and European customers so there are many competitors mostly in the US but we believe our story is compelling enough for people to check us out and then get sold on the features we offer compared to our competitors.
WHIR: Data center operators often argue that offering clean-powered web services is not as cost-effective; how does Greenqloud intend to offer these kinds of services and still turn a profit?
EH: Low energy prices and a devalued national currency helps but leveraging existing technology such as Cloud.com and other open source solutions gives us a tremendous boost. Take a look at Amazon’s or Rackspace’s latest numbers. This is no charity business.
WHIR: What is the advantage of receiving data center services from several operators over a single operator?
EH: The two main reasons that come to mind are disaster recovery and redundancy. Better leverage in negotiations which as an end result brings our customers lower prices while securing their data better.
WHIR: When does the beta program begin, and when is Greenqloud set to officially launch?
EH: We have said the Beta will start late Q4 2010 and we still stick by that. Our great team is hard at work to meet that first deadline. The grand opening will be close to the end of Q1 2011, the final date has not yet been decided on.
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