Wayne Norrie, chief executive of data centre outsourcing company Revera, says he’s totally frustrated by a less-than-holistic picture about carbon neutrality.


So-called greenness doesn’t equate with sustainability,” he says.
“Companies buy a forest, then say they’re carbon neutral.  But those trees already exist, and their carbon usage goes down only slightly.”

He’s particularly scathing of proposals by companies such as Air New Zealand for passengers to offset their carbon miles by buying trees.

“Where’s the visibility and transparency to the consumer? Who knows that a particular tree hasn’t been sold more than once?

“We pay guilt money, but what changes?”

Revera has invested heavily in modern air-conditioning in its data centres and in server virtualisation, where multiple servers can run on the same box.

Norrie says the average traditional server is often only 20% utilised. But the remaining 80% still has to be powered and cooled.

“A virtualisation environment quiesces at night into idling mode, which uses much less power. There is a potential 400% power saving for the environment.”

Virtualisation is still very new but its uptake is growing by the week, Norrie says. “We’re converting old-style boxes at a rapid rate. Over the next 18 months we expect to convert many servers.”

Companies are moving to virtulisation for reasons of power saving and to be green, he says.

“The art of sizing an application to a box is still very vague and fraught with difficulty, so people double the size of the box, then double it again to make sure they don’t run out of grunt.

“Sizing and scalability are very real issues.

“With virtualisation, if you get it wrong you can double the size in a few minutes. The benefits include flexibility, disaster recovery and performance, because you can tune it on the fly.”

Revera can provide outsourced services for a 10-person business more cheaply than such a company can do it for itself. Norrie says he hopes to drive this down to a five-person business.

“When you measure organisations in isolation, it doesn’t help. But when you tie together suppliers, customers and someone like us, it is a very good story.”

Referring back the “green” paradigm, he says there is a lot of smoke and mirrors and myopic thinking. “What happens when those trees are cut down?”