Rackspace Adds Support of Green IT

SAN ANTONIO -- Rackspace Managed Hosting today announced that through its GreenSpace initiative and relationship with NativeEnergy, a leading national marketer of renewable energy credits and carbon offsets, the IT hosting specialist will be providing support to two new renewable energy projects through the purchasing of carbon offsets.

For 2008, Rackspace will support two new renewable projects: the Penn England Family Dairy Waste to Energy Project, which will help ramp up a manure digester on this 700 cow dairy farm that displaces onsite fossil fuel use and emissions of methane, and the Farmer Owned Distributed Small Scale Wind Project in Minnesota, which supports the sale and installation of German-designed 40 kW Aeroman wind turbines that are remanufactured and customized for Midwest conditions.

Rackspace unveiled its GreenSpace initiative in June, a program designed to reduce emissions by conserving energy and increasing employee awareness of climate change, and a key component was using NativeEnergy to offset carbon emissions produced by customer servers managed within Rackspace’s data centers. Currently, Rackspace adds hundreds of new servers a month to its US-based data centers, and Rackspace will continue to offset the carbon emissions for each new customer server brought online.

By offsetting estimated emissions from new servers for 2007, Rackspace helped support the completion of the Schrack Family Dairy Waste to Energy Project in Pennsylvania, and fulfilled their portion of the funding for the Owl Feather War Bonnet Wind Farm project that will bring wind power to the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota.

“Rackspace has been an outstanding environmental ally by offsetting the estimated carbon emissions from all new servers,” said Tom Boucher, president and CEO, NativeEnergy. “Their support of these family farm-based renewable energy projects will help farmers reduce their long-term electricity costs, while helping stabilize the electricity grid with distributed, small-scale power generation. NativeEnergy’s clients have built 18 turbines in the last year, and with Rackspace’s help, we expect to build thirty or more in 2008.”Rackspace Managed Hosting