NetBenefit Sees Demand For Green Hosting

Managed hosting provider NetBenefit has turned to data centre operator Lumison for energy-efficient server hosting capacity.

It will use Lumison’s Croydon site to offer hosting services that run on 100 percent renewable energy. The design of its facility within the data centre incorporates initiatives such as cold aisle containment, which cuts the energy needed for air conditioning by up to 30 percent and the energy used by servers by 10 percent, NetBenefit said.

Lumison added that its data centres are designed to minimise waste and energy use, with Glycol-based air conditioning, heat recovery, evaporative cooling and low energy lighting.

The data centre offers 22 Amps per rack to support high density bladeservers and storage, instead of the more common maximum of 10A per rack – hence the need for effective airflow and high-efficiency cooling. It also has Gigabit Ethernet available as an option.

NetBenefit already has multiple data centres from independent vendors, linked by its own network infrastructure with bandwidth in excess of 4Gbit/s.

According to Jonathan Robinson, NetBenefit’s COO, the decision to buy in this additional data centre capacity was driven in part by customer growth, but also by an increasing demand for new energy-efficient hosting services.

“This has given us the opportunity to design our services from the ground up,” he said. “The state-of-the-art facility allows customers with business-critical websites to buy managed hosting services with green credentials, without having to compromise on reliable and flexible managed hosting services.”