As we celebrate Earth Day, many businesses, organizations and individuals will take additional time to reflect on their impact on our environment and the contributions we can all make to a sustainable future. Organizations like EarthDay.org help spearhead awareness and direct-action options we can all consider in our own lives to be ‘greener’.

The term “Green”, “Being Green” or “Going Green” all have multiple variations and meanings, but in general, we all accept that it means to help sustain the environment in some fashion. Many years ago, the Earth Day movement started more with a focus about recycling. Today, it has evolved into an awareness of sustainability by reducing overall carbon footprints through less consumption (and output of non-renewable resources to produce the goods and/or power we consume).

One of the largest non-green impacting areas we see is electronic devices like our mobile devices, computers, and servers. While desktop computers at least have power saving modes that often can reduce their usage, they still consume (and impact the environment) roughly the same as 4,500 miles driven per year of a typical US car. Servers are the worst offenders of the bunch, running 24/7, consuming large amounts of energy to keep your email, files, apps, and websites running all the time even when we are asleep.

Those high energy consuming servers, and in some cases office desktop PC’s, can all be moved to the cloud through cloud-based servers and colocation.  It may not seem obvious, but moving your servers and desktop PCs into the cloud can make a huge impact. While data centers can consume massive amounts of energy to keep those cloud-based servers running 24 hours a day (especially the massive industrial air conditioning and redundant power systems in place to support these facilities), the fact is that data centers can be scaled up to effectively utilize the best-in-class options to be efficient and sourced from green energy, to substantially reduce, or in fact eliminate their entire carbon footprint. If you colocate or host your servers in such a data center, you effectively reduce your impact on our environment significantly.

TurnKey Internet’s Green Data Center was built to have an effective carbon footprint of zero  – sourcing all its power from a massive on-site solar array and hydro-electric power provided by New York State’s Recharge NY program, on top of the most cutting-edge power efficiency and data center cooling technology.  TurnKey Internet’s state-of-the-art data center won the New York State Environmental Excellence award and The U.S. Federal Government’s Environmental Protection Agency awarded the facility the 2nd only New York Energy Star Certified Data Center designation.

So from our stand point, green is about minimizing or having zero impact on the environment – and more so, we are helping businesses take their office servers, computers, and other IT infrastructure into the cloud to minimize their carbon footprints too. This Earth Day, take a look around your home or office – and see what small changes you can do to help improve your impact on the world.

 TurnKey Internet’s New York data center is on what we like to call a carbon diet. When we constructed the facility, minimizing our impact on the environment by using clean, renewable energy and ultra-efficient design was the initial goal.  Last week, we announced that our New York data center is now at the “zero carbon footprint” status–powered by 100% renewable resources with our on-site solar system and the NYS Government’s Recharge New York hydroelectric power feed.

So what does carbon footprint mean, and what exactly is so important about a zero carbon foot print?

A carbon footprint is the measure given to the amount of green house gases produced by burning fossil fuels, measured in units of carbon dioxide. Traditional data centers and cloud services companies consume massive amounts of electricity that is produced by fossil fuels–in the U.S., that is primarily done with coal. Those green house gas emissions given off by converting coal to electricity are what cause global warming and negative global climate change. Therefore,  every device that consumes electricity (such as a computer server in your office, or a web hosting server on the Internet) is contributing to the problem.

Data centers in the U.S. and across the globe house thousands of computer servers in a central location and consume enormous amounts of electricity. Data centers consume even more electricity to keep those computer servers cool, due to the massive quantity of heat they (the computer servers) produce. The best and most recently constructed data centers utilize efficient cooling and energy distribution designs to minimize the amount of electricity they must consume. However, if they consume their electricity from coal or other fossil fuels, then the data center is still an immense source of pollution. Data centers are expected to pollute more than the airline industry by 2020, according to this 2008 article in The New York Times.

Some companies such as Yahoo and Apple have been building data centers with ultra-efficient designs, and powering their facilities with clean, renewable energy.  Many companies, data centers, and cloud service providers are seeing colossal increases in energy costs. Making the massive investments for data centers that utilize clean, renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, hydro and geothermal is finally becoming a reality.

So why should this matter to you?  Let’s say you have a computer server in your office, and finally make the transition to the cloud. You place that server–or rent a new, highly-efficient one–in a data center. You can now choose a facility that is using renewable energy, so that your computer server will no longer be powered by fossil fuels, and thus, will no longer generate CO2, which damages the environment. It’s hard to imagine that the computer server in your office is hurting the environment as it stands today, isn’t it? Moving it to the cloud is not only a wise choice for reliability, security, and redundancy, but also for the environment.

The next time you select a cloud services provider or data center to work with, make sure the data center is on a carbon diet. Your waistline may not be impacted by this diet, but the rest of the world certainly will!