It began April 17th, 2012 – Greenpeace ran it’s story about How Clean is your Cloud taking to task some of the industry giants such as Microsoft, Apple, Google and Dell – for not being as forthcoming about their energy consumption and lack of green technologies being utilized to their potential. This story set off a chain reaction of events from Apple, and even GreenPeace activists bringing awareness across the globe about Datacenters and energy utilization. It is currently leading to public protests in front of Amazon and Microsoft’s headquarters to bring awareness on the subject.

Just 18 hours later, after GreenPeace ran it’s report, TurnKey Internet unveiled it’s new Green Datacenter in New York’s Tech Valley Region showing off the latest in both Renewable Energy (both Solar, and HydroElectric) as well as massive investments in new state of the art technology that reduces energy consumption by up to 33% versus other datacenters across the globe. TurnKey Internet had already been working on this new Green Datacenter for over 12 months to release it, but the timing couldn’t be better to help everyone understand the importance of utilizing Green based technology for your “Cloud” and Datacenter.

Datacenters use massive quantities of energy, by 2020 the datacenter and Cloud Services industry will be as big of a polluter as the airline industry. Datacenters centralize power consumption, and help businesses greatly reduce their energy consumption through virtualization and shared/scaling of their Cloud resources- but as you place 100,000’s of businesses into a datacenter that makes that datacenter now consume the power of a small city or town all in one small location. True, that datacenter will still net huge savings on power consumption versus those same 100,000’s of businesses running their own office services or power consumption desktop pc’s all the time – but that doesn’t mean the Datacenter its self is exempt from being both efficient and leveraging every possible modern green technology and renewable energy resource available.

So how does this impact you directly? Well GreenPeace has fired the first bullet quite frankly, publicly shedding light on this subject to help promote awareness for Earth Day 2012. GreenPeace has now gone as far as to bring public demonstrations to protest the lack of green efficient technologies and lack of utilization of renewable energies for some of the biggest datacenter players world wide. GreenPeace’s message is simple:

■ Be more transparent about their energy usage and carbon footprint, and to share innovative solutions so that the rest of the sector can improve;

■ Develop a siting policy that demonstrates a preference to build data centers in areas where clean energy can power the facility;

■ Invest in or directly purchase renewable energy;

■ Demand that governments and electric utilities increase the amount of renewable electricity available on the grid.

We, at TurnKey also share this same vision. Knowing full well that our business model for providing Cloud Services is all about helping businesses to leverage lower cost, higher performing resources in The Cloud to replace their expensive, power-hungry in-office IT solutions of today is only 1 part of the equation. It’s vital every Cloud Service provider be leveraging advanced Green Technologies, and renewable energy or they will be part of the problem (and by 2020, among the worst polluters on the planet!).

So if your business is hosting with one of the ‘dirty’ Clouds as Greenpeace terms it – you better talk to your Cloud provider and tell them what you want, or find a Cloud provider that has made investments in the future, to responsibly provide for your IT needs now, and by 2020!