Earth Day

On April 22nd we mark the Earth Day – a global call for a change for our planet. Since 1970, it is the 50th Earth Day today, and as the slogan says it’s not a day – it’s a movement.

We believe that everyone should join this cause, to think and to plan how to improve our daily way of living in help of our planet. It’s not about taking a single action today, but it’s rather about changing the way we do everything in our life, our work and in our future. It’s about planning a making the small steps to be better. We care as it’s our planet and our future.

How do we, at CloudBalkan plan for the future of the planet?

Well ever since our first day as company, one of our core values is that whatever we do, we’ll do it in the most environmentally safe and correct way. It’s our mission to provide the most eco-friendly, servers and hosting environments. And we do it everyday for six years now!

One of the things is that – we are cool, and no it’s only today, but it’s a general practice that we minimize excessive waste on cooling. In classic data centers cooling power can be quite a large part of the power consumption, so there’s a measure called Power usage effectiveness (PUE) that shows the ratio between the Total Power Usage and the IT equipment Power Usage in a data center. It tells what is the overhead of power usage for auxiliary systems like lighting, air conditioning and so on. Typically it goes somewhere in between 1.10-1.20 and 1.70, which says 10% – 70% wasted energy.

Well in days like today we simply switch off that wasted energy. The max outside temperature today was 18.5 °C, so we achieved the quite convenient 19.2°C inside the data center with only passive cooling. Happy servers and no wasted energy.
PUE of the day: 1.00

Yes on the global scale it may not seem a huge improvement to save a few thousands of kW of electric power. But it’s the effort to least not do any more bad when it’s really not necessary.

IT is supposed to be smart and we do our best to incorporate this smartness in our facilities and services. So even a small waste saving, multiplied by the power of each day results in saving the earth lots of excessive power usage, pollution and waste.

Our message today is – be smart and make a simple and small, but long lasting change for the earth.