Rackspace launches carbon neutral managed service

IT managed services specialist Rackspace has today launched a new "carbon neutral" web hosting service that will see the company attempt to offset the carbon emissions produced from powering its datacentres.

Under the scheme Rackspace has partnered with the International Tree Foundation and agreed to pay for the planting of a tree at a reserve in Pembrokeshire each time it buys a new server. New and existing customers that have their IT operations run by Rackspace will be offered the new offsetting service free of charge, the company said.

Fabio Torlini, marketing director for the Europe, Middle East and Africa at Rackspace, said the initiative had been designed as part of Rackspace's employee engagement programme but customers have also shown considerable interest in the project.

"[The scheme] wasn't driven by our customer base – we've never had a customer come up and say 'we want this service to be carbon neutral'," he said. "But once we informed them of the scheme we got a great response with customers coming back and suggesting additional steps we could take."

The announcement comes as some scientists have begun to question the effectiveness of reducing atmospheric carbon levels through tree planting schemes. Critics argue that trees are a high risk means of consuming carbon as calculations for the amount they offset are usually worked out on the basis of them surviving for a long period.

Torlini admitted that each new tree Rackspace plants will only offset the emissions generated by a server for one year, but he added that it was "a step in the right direction" and that the company was in talks with the CarbonNeutral company to develop a more comprehensive offsetting strategy.

Other critics have argued that carbon offsetting programmes distract firms from the more environmentally beneficial strategy of improving energy efficiency and reducing carbon emissions.

But Torlini insisted that Rackspace's managed service model was in fact helping to improve its customers' energy efficiency as hosted applications run by third party specialists tend to boast higher service utilisation rates than those run in-house. "The whole point of managed services is that opposed to firms having to run their own air conditioned datacentres and support desks we can do it more efficiently for them," he explained.

He added that the company was also in the middle of migrating from Intel to AMD-based infrastructure – a move it estimates will reduce its energy consumption by up to 20 percent.