Memset earns top environmental award

Cloud provider, Memset has been recognised at this year's Energy & Environment Awards for their ongoing innovative energy-efficient project to actively and scientifically lower the energy footprint of their services, in particular, examining the efficiency of their Miniserver VM virtual machines. 

Scooping the ‘Innovative Energy-Efficient Project Award’, Memset’s project involved examining the load levels and power consumption of their Miniserver VM® host server estate for 32 months.

By iteratively refining and fine-tuning the host hardware, Memset have been able to reduce the average power consumption of one Miniserver Compute Unit (MCU) from 26watts mid-2009 to 4.7watts end-2011. Since then, consumption has further improved to roughly 3.7watts per MCU.

Memset have reduced their power consumption faster than Moore’s Law predicts.  Helping them maintain their position as Britain’s cheapest virtual machine (VM) provider by delivering a higher performance product through fine-tuning and the elimination of bottlenecks.

The judges said: “Memset have been awarded the winner for their excellent project which has shown how attention to detail on a company’s core business can lead to sufficient energy savings at low cost.  The potential to replicate is substantial."

Kate Craig-Wood, MD of Memset, who also headed up the project said: "This is another fantastic achievement for Memset.  We're delighted to have been recognised for the efforts we have made in substantially reducing the power of our Miniserver VM® virtual servers.  We encourage all businesses to collect and analyse more data about their own power consumption and activities. It is likely that larger businesses will be mandated to do so anyway, so it makes sense to get ahead of the game now!"

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