Guidance Goes Green

MARINA DEL REY, Calif. -- Guidance (http://www.Guidance.com), which helps online retailers achieve market domination by creating captivating and engaging online shopping experiences, today announced that it is now providing its clients with hosting solutions that are 100 percent carbon-neutral.

The move will not require any upgrades or additional investment on the clients part. It’s a new standard practice for Guidance – the latest in a series of changes undertaken over the past year to help the company achieve its goal of operating as an environmentally aware, carbon-neutral company.

To reduce overall energy use, Guidance bought and is now using energy-efficient servers and processors to host its clients’ websites: HP’s energy-optimized ProLiant® servers (DL360 G5 and DL380 G5), with the low-voltage Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor L5420. Guidance also is moving to more virtualization in the company’s development environment to reduce internal energy consumption.

Guidance has successfully offset all of its remaining electricity-related CO2 emissions from its servers by purchasing renewable energy credits (RECs) through BeGreen Business, the carbon offset brand of Green Mountain Energy. The credits are made from wind and biomass sources located throughout the United States, helping avoid an average of more than 52,500 pounds of CO2 emissions annually. This has the equivalent environmental benefit of not driving a car roughly 58,500 miles, or of recycling almost 130,000 aluminum cans and more than 21,000 pounds of newspaper.

“We’re giving online retailers an easy way to embrace green hosting,” said Jon Provisor, Guidance co-owner and CTO. “We’ve been working for more than a year now to make our business operate in a more sustainable, environmentally responsible way. We’re especially excited about this achievement, because it’s something we can offer our clients – making sustainability a shared effort.”Guidance Software Inc.