As we all know there is an incredible amount of attention being paid to the “greening” of IT. Most people in the hosting industry regard this as the responsibility of the datacenter, as they can make the largest impact with their large-scale deployments of energy-efficient power supplies and processors, efficient physical layouts, cooling practices, and recycling.

Outside of the hosting industry the options become more varied—namely the ability to save massive amounts of power by turning off unneeded infrastructure during non-peak times. A great example would be a call center that operates 9-5 and shuts their workstations down when not in use, or an accounting firm that turns off their billing servers when they go home for the day. This is far from a common practice currently, but it is a very logical and easy step to conserving power. The gotcha here is that unless you can physically walk over to the infrastructure and power it back on, you are going to have to call someone to do it for you. Then wait for them to do it for you. Then hope that they don’t forget. This leaves many businesses with infrastructure in an outsourced datacenter throwing their hands in the air, because it’s frankly just too risky to not have their resources available at 9:00am when their day starts—might as well just leave everything on.

The story is a little different here at SoftLayer. Using our innovative network design and remote power control, our customers are redefining the way that IT is deployed in an outsourced datacenter. They run their web and mail servers here, pretty normal stuff. But utilizing the SSL to private backend network feature (allowing them to completely disable connectivity to the public network), they are also deploying their domain controllers here. And their office file servers. And their central servers to which their local thin clients connect. They are getting them out of the closet in the back of the office and into a datacenter on enterprise-grade hardware. And you know what they do at the end of the day? They turn them off. The next morning, a click on the power control in the SoftLayer Portal brings them instantly back online anytime, day or night. No phone call to support needed, no waiting for someone else to do it for you. The impact of technology designed to give you optimal control of your IT environment is staggering, especially when you see so many companies utilizing it.

So not only can you choose to deploy your operations in a datacenter that is making enormous strides in green infrastructure, but you can also deploy in one that provides you with the ability to control your own impact as well.

And just like that, everyone gets to be green. And sorry, envy doesn’t count.

The Three P’s are Changing

The three P’s in the hosting world have always been Ping, Power and Pipe. Salespeople regurgitated them relentlessly and operations personnel just shortened them to the P’s because we talked about them all the time. The three P’s of hosting have changed in the recent years and those not aware of the changing landscape are doomed for failure. I propose a new three P standard (described below).

1) Power — I list this one first because it is by far the most important. Power is the single greatest limiting factor to technology. If you don’t understand the importance of power on future technology, you should exit the industry now. If you are not concerned with power, don’t meter power and not fixated with power, you will be in serious trouble in the next 12 to 24 months. The entire industry has shifted to being “green” and large scale datacenter operators are so focused on power utilization, they are building and designing systems completely based on power usage and/or location. It’s one of the most critical operating costs and must be understood to maximize long term success and profitability. Here at SoftLayer, we are obsessed with power utilization and efficiency and focus on mitigating power and heat (byproduct of power) to a bare minimum. We know the power usage of every server and network device located in the datacenter and track it real time. We are continuously seeking new low power technologies, engaged in industry consortiums looking for new alternatives, and actively planning our power needs through the end of 2010.

2) Packets — Five years ago, the internet backbones were full of big fat packets that were easily passed by backbone and edge routers without issue. In the recent years, small packet technologies have greatly reduced the size of the average packet transversing the internet. For those of n00bs out there, smaller packets reduce the overall throughput of the routers processing the packets. The smaller the packets, the greater the reduction in horsepower of those routers. The fast rise in gaming, VOIP and other small packet intense applications has cut the average packet size in half in the last two years and I would expect that to occur again the next two years. Packet size can take the aggregate throughput of a router from several hundred gigs at large packet sizes to potentially single digits of gigabit throughput due to the processing required. Here at SoftLayer, we have installed and upgraded to the fastest routing technologies by Cisco to ensure the greatest network performance, but there are many legacy carrier, broadband, and enterprise routers out there that have limited capacity due to changing packet size. Hosting providers that were built on eBay surplus network equipment from the late 90’s will soon begin to implode.

3) IP’s (IP Addresses) — Ok…not really a “P” but I take a little creative leeway here. IPv4 addresses are disappearing faster than norm’s plate at the Hungry Heifer. ARIN has publically announced the need to shift to IPv6 and numerous articles have outlined the D-Day for IPv4 space. Most experts agree, its coming fast and that it will occur sometime in 2010 at the current pace (that’s about two years for those counting). IPv6 brings enough IP space for an infinite number of users along with improved security features and several other operational efficiencies that will make it very popular. The problem lies between getting from IPv4 to IPv6. We are caught in this “chicken and egg” scenario where we can’t leave one without the other being completely reliable. Although I think we will get to IPv6 without too much of a headache, I do think the IPv4 space will become extinct prior to a full scale transition and there will be a time where the cost of IPv4 IP’s will skyrocket because of supply/demand. This should be at the top of your list as a hosting provider because additional IP space typically means new customer and/or expansion of existing customers. If you don’t have a conservation plan for IPv4, migration plan for IPv6, and transition plan between the two – you may already be too late. Here at SoftLayer, we have been planning for over a year and 2008 will include a rollout of IPv6 to all those customers who seek to run dual stacks and will include incentives to customers who are able to shift to IPv6 completely.

The Three P’s will likely change again in a few years as the industry continues to evolve and we find a way to solve the current challenges facing the industry. For now, focus and plan on these three and you should have a long successful existence.

The SoftLayer contingency recently returned from attending HostingCon 2007 in Chicago and I have to say, it was a great experience. We had a lot of opportunities to meet up with many of our customers, meet with a lot of vendors and potential vendors as well as visit with some of our competitors.

While there, I had the privilege of participating in a panel discussion on “Green Hosting: Hope or Hype“. Isabel Wang did a great job of moderating the discussion with Doug Johnson, Dallas Kashuba, and myself. The overall premise of the panel discussion was to talk about green initiatives, how they affect the hosting industry, what steps can hosting companies take and is it something we should be pursuing.

It was interesting to hear the different approaches that companies take to be green. Should companies focus their efforts on becoming carbon neutral by purchasing carbon credits such as DreamHost, by promising to plant a tree for each server purchased such as Dell, by working on virtualization strategies such as SWSoft or by working to eliminate the initial impact on the environment such as we have done at SoftLayer. You can probably tell from one of my previous blog posts where SoftLayer is focusing our efforts to help make a difference.

Besides the efforts of the individual companies on the panel, there were some good questions from the audience that helped spur the conversation. Does the hosting industry need its own organization for self regulation or are entities such as The Green Grid sufficient? Do any of the hosting industry customers really care if a company is “green”? Should a hosting company care if it’s “green”? And, what exactly does “being green” mean?

While there are differing opinions to all of those questions, there really isn’t a “wrong” answer. Ultimately all of the steps companies take - no matter how small - will help to some extent. And no matter what the motivation - whether a company is “being green” in an effort to gain publicity, to save money or to simply “make a difference” - it’s all worth it in the end.