April 5, 2004 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — With a truly unusual objective among Web hosting companies, Solar Data Centers (solardatacenters.com), a hosting company that relies on solar energy, is planning to build a micro data center in a bank vault, powered by energy from solar panels in the parking lot.
“Our goal is to buy an abandoned bank in North Carolina,” said Solar Data Centers CEO Steve May. “We’re going to take this bank, rip off the safe door and put in racks, and take out the vault area. We’ll turn the safe into a micro-data center – a 200-square-foot room with enough room for 45 servers. The metal structure inside will keep it cool.
“Then we will build a solar canopy over the parking lot. We’ll need 5,000 square feet of solar panels to accomplish this – it’s the equivalent of three sets of drive-through lanes of panel.”
May said he has already narrowed the selection to four properties where the new data center might be, and he expects to have it running by the end of next year.
The servers, he said, will be DC powered, meaning that light will hit the silicon of the panels and create an electrical current that will flow onto the wires. “Logistically, in most businesses, the power is AC, so it can flow forward or backward. There is an array of DC powered products, but no one has used it for what we are going to do with it.”
Once the micro-data center is built, May said he will move forward with products and services using the hosting management program Sphera. “When the new center is up and running, we’ll load this tool onto our servers. It will be as easy as drag and click, and people won’t even notice. The relocation will be easy.”
Solar Data Centers has been working on its plan for this green data center since its inception 18 months ago. The company’s current data center in Atlanta is powered with energy it purchases from a nearby school. As part of a school project, students help create energy by maintaining solar panels on the roofs of area high schools. While Solar Data Centers said it would likely continue supporting this school project in the future, its goal is to have its own solar power pumping energy into its data center.
Solar Data Centers has about 300 customers – most of them somehow connected to the promotion of green energy. Last month, it announced its latest customer,the Geothermal Resources Council, which selected the host to redesign and expand the GRC Web site. The new site will include a GRC research library, a geothermal research resource with more than 26,000 pages of research material for the public.
Another of its green customers is the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, which uses Solar Data Centers to host one of the sites it helps manage, www.millionsolarroofs.com. For many of these environmentally conscious clients, Solar Data CentersÂ’ use of renewable energy can be an important selling point.
“There were lots of hosting options that had environmental focus, but this was the only one to use renewable energy so that was the deal-sealer for us,” said Jane Pulaski, of Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC). “Since we are a renewable energy based organization, we thought that it was important to put our proverbial mouth where our money is.”
IREC has a contract to maintain the Web site for the US Department of Energy’s Million Solar Roofs project, an initiative to facilitate the installation of solar energy systems on one million US buildings by 2010. May is hoping this trend will continue, and more energy-friendly government sites will come on board with them.
Although it has succeeded at winning over the environmental-friendly sites, May admits it has been somewhat of a challenge to attract others who are not invested in green energy. He said his company plans to focus more this year on developing new strategies to attract other business as well.
