GreenTech and DataCenters - Part 4

I wasn't planning a part 4 to my GreenTech week, but as I mentioned, there is a LOT of Green news out recently. Here are just a few more goodies I ran across today:

The Uptime Institute released its Global Green 100 List today. Many familiar names in tech are on the list including all of the companies I mentioned in GreenTech Part 2.

GreenBiz.com notes that Green, Tech and GreenTech are on the rise in the FastCompany 50 List. Cisco managed the #5 spot on the 2009 list. Cisco has a number of videos I found interesting lately:

• A new TechWise TV podcast is out and discusses Cisco EnergyWise

• John Chambers is 'the man'. This video at OpenZine is a talk he gave on the MIT campus and is long, but worth watching. If you don't watch the whole thing, do forward to about 44 minutes in where he answers a question -- I really like what he says here. He is an awesome speaker and as commented on the page with the video -- "John Chambers gets it" ; except for the comment John makes in the video about being a Red Sox fan. :)
  

• Another video: Rethinking Education for the 21st Century was posted on a Cisco blog.

Rackspace announced today some new tools available to help customers assess and reduce their environmental impact. Their carbon footprint calculator was developed by NativeEnergy.

Check out this video from Google and GE : Plug Into the Smart Grid

An article from the Wall Street Journal Environmental Capitalism section was pretty interesting: Purdue Researchers Put Emissions On Google Earth. Of course any excuse for me to use Google Earth is a good one.

Mosso Enhancemens to The Hosting Cloud

In February of this year Cloud Hosting provider Mosso launched a new and improved version of its core hosting offering - The Hosting Cloud. The $100/month offering provided 24x7 support, 500GB bandwidth, 50GB disk space and 3 million web requests per month. In May they announced a private beta release of their new CloudFS Cloud Storage Service.

On Wednesday they announced a new Mosso control panel and provisioning system for The Hosting Cloud. This is a major release for Mosso and gives them a greater degree of scalability as well as greatly enhanced usability features. The Control Panel's file manager introduces a new snapshot tool that allows you to reinstate previous versions of your files. The control panel was built using the Google Web Toolkit, giving them a robust AJAX framework. The new provisioning system was built using Apache ServiceMix , a pretty cool foundation architecture laden with buzz words and acronyms ("an open source ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) that combines the functionality of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and an Event Driven Architecture (EDA) to create an agile, enterprise ESB.) This new platform sets the stage for a broader range of services that Mosso can provide.

Mosso was started in late 2007 and is funded development from parent company Rackspace. The Mosso infrastructure is spread across Rackspace data centers.

I think the type of offering that Mosso presents is a pretty close picture of what the future of hosting is. It will take a while for mind-sets to change, but eventually customers will migrate from what Rackspace offers today to a Mosso Hosting Cloud. Reading the Mosso FAQ it is evident that they have already had many questions from those that are still stuck in the traditional hosting model mindset. I think with financial backing from Rackspace, their talented group of developers, and the right timing and service offering in a crowded market, Mosso can (and probably will) go far.

Rackspace Green Initiatives

There is carrier neutral colocation - why not have carbon neutral server farms? TMC Green Technology World interviews Rackspace as a follow-up to their customer survey about making their data centers green.

Rackspace is focusing on company conservation, customer offerings and employee education. They are also co-marketing efforts from their partner NativeEnergy. NativeEnergy is a pretty interesting company and has a good list of big name companies as members. They have a number of renewable energy sources that aren't always the ones making the news. My favorite is "remooable energy". :)

Check out the TMC article here