Business & Environment

100% confidence.

Zero carbon energy. Zero additional cost.

As an issue it’s seldom off the front pages. Environmental pollution is a fact of life, and few but the most ardent sceptics now doubt the impact of industry on climate change.

Yet at the same time, new regulatory measures, such as the Sarbannes Oxley Act and Basel II, require more and more from you and your IT systems. Demand for greater reliability, availability and longevity means an exponential increase in the sheer volume of data you need to store; while environmental issues mean you’re under ever increasing pressure to cut energy use, and reduce your carbon footprint.

Meanwhile, Gartner analysts predict that half of the world’s traditional data centres will not have enough energy capacity to meet their power and cooling requirements by the end of 2008. [1]

A rethink is long overdue.

Smartbunker vs Traditional Data Centres

Smartbunker is the UK's first and only data centre to provide low energy, high performance hosting using zero carbon energy within an infrastructure designed for minimum environmental impact.

Traditional data centres are faced with a problem. Their investment in outdated infrastructure means they're stuck with what they've got, (at least until they catch up) which is an energy-hungry operation that was never designed with low power consumption, and the environment as a priority.

Enter Smartbunker...

Conceived from day one to minimise energy consumption throughout its entire operation, Smartbunker is designed to run on zero carbon energy derived from renewable resources (wind turbines). This is backed-up with the latest generation of uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and fail-safe bio-diesel emergency generators to provide guaranteed uninterruptible power.

Our low energy IBM BladeCenter™ servers utilise power-saving technology to consume up to 60% less energy than comparable blades . Combined with Smartbunker's constant subterranean ambient temperature, this saves up to 104 megawatt hours per year, per rack. With a traditional data centre this would have equated to a massive 45 tonnes of CO2 per rack, per year, but not at Smartbunker, thanks to our zero carbon energy!

How do you benefit?

Smartbunker’s zero carbon power costs more to buy than conventional energy sources, but we use less of it. Our low-energy servers also cost us more. But the extra cost is offset by the greatly reduced amount of energy they use. (Our IBM Blade servers also happen to be far more efficient than ordinary servers.)

All of which means that Smartbunker will cost you no more than a traditional data centre, but you'll know the servers and the rest of our infrastructure managing your hosting requirements are far superior to those of our competitors.

Add to this our unrivalled levels of security and customer support, and we think you'll agree that’s good for your business and good for the environment.

[1] Gartner Says 50 percent of data centres will have insufficient power and cooling capacity by 2008. Gartner Inc. Press Release, November 29, 2006.

“As the UK’s first zero carbon energy data centre, Smartbunker has moved the data hosting industry forward, and is clearly setting an important precedent. We are pleased to be partnering with a company whose focus is on both service excellence, and utilising renewable ’deep green‘ energy from Ecotricity that delivers zero carbon emissions.”
Dale Vince OBE, Ecotricity – Founder & Managing Director

Smartbunker is using Ecotricity’s ‘New Energy Plus’ service with electricity generated from 100% renewable sources; in this case the energy is derived through wind turbines. Wind is a sustainable fuel source, and also the world’s fastest growing energy source.