Hosting company AISO.net fully powered by solar energy

Environmentally friendly company AISO (Affordable Internet Service Online), located in Southern California, operates a hosting datacenter that is fully powered by servers and cooling by electricity from 120 solar panels.
The 2000-square-foot data center (about 186 square meters) is owned by the family-owned AISO company, which has been operating for 13 years, and is built “away from civilization” in a deserted countryside. An open desert area, a sunny climate, but problems with the supply of electricity to a remote farm where he lives, prompted the owner of the company and its technical director Phil Neil to take advantage of free energy - solar.
For the past 9 years, since 2001, the AISO-built data center , which provides hosting services for many of its customers, fully provides itself with electricity using an environmentally-friendly source - sunlight.


Undoubtedly, the use of such an energy source with limited volumes made it necessary to search and find many non-trivial solutions when building a data center, paying particular attention to the greatest possible energy savings at all levels, and also using the least energy-consuming solutions, but not at the expense of performance and reliability.


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The company uses IBM BladeCenter blades on AMD processors, Cisco network equipment, and NetApp FAS storage systems, which are characterized by extremely high storage efficiency using thin provisioning, RAID-DP and deduplication of stored data. As a software platform used VMware ESX.

Harsh energy conditions forced AISO to use a variety of non-trivial energy saving solutions. For example, the roof of a datacenter's office and the adjacent office is covered with turf and sown with grass, successfully absorbing solar heat, and instead of traditional air conditioners, water coolers are used, whose water tanks (38 thousand liters) cool down overnight. Moreover, after sunset, when the power supply of the center switches to accumulators filled during the day, the datacenter's room is cooled with cold and dry “outboard” air pumped through air filters, the temperature of which often drops to 10C at night, which allows saving on the “traditional” very uneconomical air conditioning cooling.
Savings are made, including in the office - all the electricity available to the company must “work”. Instead of the traditional “energy-saving” lamps, AISO uses LEDs in the office, which reduced the power consumption to 11 watts per such lamp, and also makes extensive use of a special design that “throws” sunlight into the office by a system of mirrors and light guides.
“Since we use thin clients and virtualized desktops in our office, we managed to achieve power consumption of just 6 watts per workplace,” says Neil. “We are thinking over the possibility of delivering a small turbine-wind generator from our chassis with a speed of about 9 meters per second, which will power our office workstations.”

The choice of IBM Bladecenter platform using AMD Opteron was also due to its higher energy efficiency. “We found,” says Phil Neil, “that 14 conventional rack-mount servers with 625-watt power supplies consume a total of 8750 watts of power, while the IBM Bladecenter with 14 comparable power servers in a blade constructive (LS20) consumes 3990 watts "That’s just 285 watts per server. Besides, AMD Opteron processors used in such servers emit less heat."


Totally applied solutions allowed achieving energy efficiency indicators (PUE - Power Usage Effectiveness - the ratio of consumed electricity to useful used) equal to the extremely high value of 1.14 (for comparison, typical values ​​in the data center industry today are between 2.0 and 3.0, that is, the usual data center consumes electricity twice three times more than useful use)

A major role in saving is the use of virtualization tools. The company provides its customers and resellers with “virtual dedicated servers” based on the VMware ESX platform.
Using VMware allowed to bring the load of server processors, on average up to 60-70%, against the usual 10-15 for "physical" servers. It also increased utilization efficiency and saved energy.

In general, the concept of "efficiency of use" is understandably at the forefront for AISO, which is why NetApp FAS was chosen as the centralized SAN storage system, which has a uniquely high storage class in its class and allows using deduplication technology for stored data without significant loss of productivity. Deduplication is a tool for automatically removing duplicates of data stored on disks, for example, the same files \ Windows \ System32 or / usr / bin in many dozens of hosts and virtual machines, which allows, in some cases, to reduce the amount of occupied space, and as a result, the number of hard drives used in the solution, that is, power supply, cooling, and further along all the steps.

Paradoxically, this is true: with the delivery of the Internet channel to the AISO data center, there were significantly fewer problems than with the laying of electrical cable (where you are, Nikola Tesla;). Internet service provider NextPhaseWireless installed in AISO equipment for high-speed redundant radio channel, which AISO is connected to a fiber-optic network.
AISO recently laid a traditional fiber-optic line (1Gbps), and today AISO is connected to three independent backbones of the largest American Internet service providers.
AISO uses a redundant pair of Cisco 7300VXR routers to connect to the Internet channel, and a pair of Cisco ASA 5500 and SOURCEfire 3D devices provide security, control and protection from DDoS.


Yes, AISO hosting solution turned out about 60% more expensive than building a “regular hosting datacenter” (“from shit and sticks”;) , but today the company saves about $ 3,000 monthly on electricity bills, which allows it to gradually “play back” made in the process of building a data center costs.

The company has fully paid off loans, serves more than 15,000 customers and today is growing at 20% per year.
"We plan this year to organize a special scheme of air cooling of solar panels, which will allow us to remove from them about 15-20% more power, as well as additionally install another 40 or 50 panels to the existing 120, which will give us the necessary power reserve, and keep expanding, ”says Phil Neil.