LeaseWeb has a well deserved reputation, as one of the most green, energy efficient, and environmentally friendly hosts worldwide. LeaseWeb is among the largest hosts in Europe, serving a global clientele. LeaseWeb is well known as a green technology leader, encouraging the development of cost effective, sustainable, carbon neutral hosting. LeaseWeb customers hosted in the state-of-the-art green datacenter, EvoSwitch have participated in many of these green initiatives. LeaseWeb clients have embraced our vision of maintaining a sustainable carbon neutral energy footprint. Customers recognize that environmentally friendly hosting solutions benefit them, since eliminating wasted energy results in lower hosting costs, resulting in better price points available to LeaseWeb customers.

Hosting some of its customers at EvoSwitch allows LeaseWeb to offer green carbon neutral high quality, state-of-the-art hosting solutions, suitable for a wide range of requirements, from single servers to large enterprise hosting solutions. EvoSwitch is one of a range of datacenters utilized by LeaseWeb to meet customer hosting requirements. LeaseWeb continues to devote serious R&D resources to achieve even higher levels of energy efficiency in the future. Recently, we have expanded our green initiative by testing an entirely new green hosting concept, with extremely successful, environmentally friendly outcomes for our customers. This new green approach will further reduce our already low carbon footprint.

Not too Hot; Not too Cold; Just Right!

Servers and IT equipment must be kept at reasonable ambient temperatures and environmental conditions to operate properly. A datacenter need to employ an effective method to remove the considerable amounts of heat generated by the operation of IT equipment. Traditionally, datacenters required huge industrial strength air and environmental conditioning equipment, including massive chillers and condensers to keep the temperature and humidity levels within acceptable ranges.

Unfortunately, this inefficient approach to air conditioning required inordinate amounts of energy, which was essentially wasted, to remove excess heat, in order to allow IT equipment to function properly. If chillers fail, for example, temperatures would start rising sharply in a matter of minutes, swiftly rendering servers inoperable, and causing serious customer reliability issues. Most datacenters throughout the world still utilize this very inefficient, old-fashioned air conditioning cycle to keep their IT equipment at optimum temperatures. Such an obsolete approach does substantial damage to the environment by wasting energy, and causing needless energy expenses, which are passed on to the customer as increased charges.

LeaseWeb had a better idea. LeaseWeb has recently participated in a new Ultra Green initiative, piloting even more efficient, advanced, environmentally friendly solutions to meet customer hosting requirements. The EvoSwitch datacenter has been ground-zero for testing many of these revolutionary new green initiatives.

EvoSwitch datacenter points to a sustainable Ultra Green hosting future

Since its inception, the EvoSwitch datacenter has been a pathfinder in the development of efficient green datacenter infrastructure for hosts wanting the most highly efficient carbon neutral hosting. Hosting some of its customers at EvoSwitch allows LeaseWeb to provide quality hosting in an extremely green hosting environment, while offering: state-of-the-art datacenter features; superior technical support and innovative hosting solutions.  The Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is a standard industry metric of energy efficiency. The PUE at EvoSwitch currently equals 1,5, which is extremely low compared to the average of most commercial datacenters worldwide and EvoSwitch continues to improve on it.  (The PUE equals total facility power divided by IT equipment power. Lower is better, and the best is 1,0, or no wasted energy.)

Recent research into better green, environmentally friendly hosting outcomes has yielded major improvements — so good, the result has been named “Ultra Green” environmental hosting. During the last six months, EvoSwitch, in cooperation with Dell, HP, Supermicro, ASUS, and Microsoft, has tested an entirely new way of cooling with very impressive results. EvoSwitch improvements combine a number of existing green technologies:

• Free Cooling — provided by feeding cooler outside filtered air into EvoSwitch, when climate temperatures are favorable, to cool IT equipment, without the use of mechanical refrigeration, saving substantial energy costs; and
• Cool Aisle Containment — concentrating and trapping the cool supply air from computer room air condition units (CRAC), where it is needed most, at the server intake.  By enclosing the entire cold aisle, so cool air does not escape, and the warm air from the hot aisle does not re-circulate to the server intake, the efficiency of our CRAC can be greatly improved, requiring substantially less energy for cooling.

The new Ultra Green approach melds these existing EvoSwitch green technologies for controlling air flow circulation and environmental management with the set-up of cooling equipment in a totally new and very innovative manner. As a result the servers and IT equipment within this very green environment have extremely low levels of total energy usage.

Hosting clients in an Ultra Green datacenter, such as EvoSwitch, results in significant improvements in our already excellent price-quality ratio for LeaseWeb customers, since energy use remains a notable and rising factor of hosting costs for datacenters. Utilizing Ultra Green hosting solutions also means that the performance and reliability of IT equipment gets a boost, thanks to the increased cooling system efficiency, as well as substantial energy cost savings.

Ultra Green hosting initiatives are not the only way LeaseWeb provides its customers with cost effective hosting solutions. In addition, to these new environmental hosting approaches, LeaseWeb continues to perfect software based hosting opportunities to maximize customer hosting efficiency. For example, the LeaseWeb VMware solution, utilized by an increasing number of LeaseWeb clients, allows customers to maximize their hosting and energy efficiency, by virtualizing their entire IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, networks as a shared utility at LeaseWeb, obtaining a secure, 24/7 technical support environment, combined with the opportunity to host in an environmentally friendly, carbon neutral datacenter, EvoSwitch. LeaseWeb VMware gives our clients the ability to quickly and easily grow their hosting services, as their business increases.. The LeaseWeb VMware solution is just one of a number of ways LeaseWeb empowers its customers to manage all their hosting requirements with customized solutions to meet commercial and enterprise hosting needs, in a sustainable, cost efficient way. Consult us for further innovative hosting solutions to meet specific hosting requirements.

Specially Priced Ultra Green Hosting solutions available now to LeaseWeb Customers

We are currently in the pilot phase of our Ultra Green Hosting rollout. As an incentive to try our new Ultra-Green hosted servers, many Ultra Green server packages are now available at reduced prices to both new and existing customers, The results to date from the pilot Ultra Green hosting project have been outstanding, with superb stability and a low carbon footprint, combined with LeaseWeb quality and service. Based on the success of the initial pilot, we plan to scale up the service availability to all customers desiring this new environmentally friendly alternative. In cooperation with our partners, we are pleased to be able to offer this Ultra Green energy friendly alternative at attractive introductory prices, including substantial price reductions available, for a limited time. For more details, or to place an order immediately, please contact LeaseWeb Sales.

R&D at LeaseWeb

At LeaseWeb, we embrace the strategy of focusing on our clients’ requirements to ensure superior customer outcomes. We do business with very large bandwidth consumers, such as enterprise, media companies, and content delivery networks (CDN); as well as resellers, including system integrators, web designers and application developers. LeaseWeb also serves many other customers who simply want to have the best hosting experience possible, with a host which meets and exceeds their expectations with world class service and network quality, combined with many cost effective solutions available to meet their needs.

LeaseWeb began its focus on meeting the hosting needs of its clients from our inception in 1997. LeaseWeb remains strongly committed to providing great hosting services with cutting edge technology and excellent customer support. LeaseWeb hosting solutions allow our clients, located throughout the world, to achieve outstanding hosting results every day.

LeaseWeb also embraces efficiency in our business processes, product and service offerings. We invest heavily in research and development, with our technically advanced, highly skilled R&D team, highly focused on meeting our customers’ requirements. For example, we have developed tools to allow our clients easy and effective control of their LeaseWeb hosting services.

LeaseWeb is committed to making our datacenters more environmentally friendly and energy efficient. Recently, our R&D-team developed a new cooling solution for our clients – Ultra Green Hosting, with an extremely energy friendly outcome – a win-win proposition for the environment, with increased energy efficiency — and our customers, allowing them the opportunity for more economical hosting solutions.

LeaseWeb hosting solutions help clients achieve success – the AFAS Story

An example of LeaseWeb, working with its customers, to achieve great results, is our client, AFAS. AFAS, founded in 1996, currently has more than 300 employees. It is a very successful company, well-known in the Netherlands for its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. ERP software integrates all facets of the business process including: planning, manufacturing, sales, and marketing. ERP replaces the many standalone management systems used by different company departments, with a single unified ERP program, divided into software linked modules. ERP empowers a company’s employees, by allowing them a 360° view of company processes, for example, order fulfillment. In 2009, AFAS started delivering web based applications – Software as a Service (SaaS), utilizing the LeaseWeb VMware hosting solution, under the name: AFAS Online (www.afasonline.nl).

“Focus and Efficiency are the keys to developing great software products to fulfil AFAS customer needs”, state Piet Mars and Ton van der Veldt, the founders of AFAS, when asked the secret of the remarkable success of their company. This strategy has definitely paid off handsomely for AFAS. Last year, AFAS grew its revenues by 20 percent to almost 44 million Euros with net profits of 10,5 million Euros. ERP by SaaS, hosted on the LeaseWeb VMware platform, played a notable part in AFAS’ rapid revenue growth last year.

LeaseWeb VMware Solution Provides AFAS with a technologically advanced platform for SaaS hosting

We offer the LeaseWeb VMware solution for customers requiring virtualization, management, resource optimization, application availability and operational automation capabilities in a fully integrated offering. VMware virtualizes the entire IT infrastructure, including servers, storage and networks. LeaseWeb VMware combines these resources into a simple and uniform set of computing resources in the virtual environment. With a LeaseWeb VMware platform, clients using our VMware solution can manage their resources as a shared utility. Client can dynamically provision these resources efficiently to different business units and projects, without worrying about the underlying hardware differences and limitations.

By utilizing LeaseWeb hosting solutions, AFAS continues to achieve great cost efficiencies and superior performance, compared with hosting its applications in-house. Among the many benefits AFAS SaaS receives by hosting on the LeaseWeb VMware platform include: a secure hosting solution; always available 24/7 technical support; and location in the state-of-the-art green, carbon neutral datacenter, EvoSwitch. LeaseWeb is one of the very few hosts capable of delivering a comprehensive VMware infrastructure hosting layer solution to meet customer requirements.

By now it should be clear that the ‘secret sauce’ we used for AFAS to provide a successful hosting outcome is the same superior quality we provide to all LeaseWeb customers. Focusing on our customer needs and efficiently meeting their requirements allows LeaseWeb clients to achieve superior hosting outcomes, no matter whether clients are large or small, or, indeed, whatever their hosting requirements may be. We welcome your inquires, for new or enhanced services now or in the future. Contact us at sales@leaseweb.com for more details on how LeaseWeb can help you with all your data hosting requirements.

There are different estimations of the whole Internet traffic, but we may generate 0.5 up to 1% of the world Internet. In 2010 we will keep growing!

[2009-12-08 update: correction in percentage traffic]

Last week, we connected another AMS-IX connection, which gives us a total of 120Gbps connection. At the very moment it was connected, we were already doing over 100Gbps at the AMS-IX. This makes us the largest traffic sending/receiving party on the largest internet exchange of the world! According to the AMS-IX there is no other company connected to the AMS-IX transmitting more traffic via the exchange as we do.

AMS-IX traffic @ LeaseWeb

Interaction with our key-accounts

More attention for our key accounts will hopefully help the pace and manner in which the online businesses of LeaseWeb clients develop.  We would like to create a relationship by which our account managers will personally communicate the latest developments within LeaseWeb and the overall hosting market.  They will also listen to individual needs within client organizations, so they can help clients out with our overall and client specific offerings and/or knowledge and be the contact for these clients.

At this moment developments within hosting are going fast, with new technologies arising, among which virtualization of server and storage environments.  We want to share our knowledge on these subjects in a personal way and display the efforts we put in providing new technologies including the expansion of our existing services.

Enterprises and resellers

The ongoing accretion of new clients is important to us because scale extension gives us a guarantee that the purchasing power of LeaseWeb will remain stable and that we’re able to maintain our excellent price/quality ratio.  On the other hand we really want to work on our relationship with existing clients, especially the ones that can profit financially and business wise from a better insight in developments on the hosting side.

Value-added resellers, internet professionals and enterprises…they might like it when they more frequently will be informed by us about product and hosting market developments, to get frequent input with actual price developments and promotions, and to get a comforted feeling that their hosting solution is in safe hands.  For the ones who don’t, just let us know.

Bandwidth demands are rising too, due to the penetration of video in web environments on a broad scale (our network is the proof, with currently 440 Gbps in use and 810 Gbps available). And streaming hosting clients ask for new ways to deliver their content to end-users. An innovative attitude towards our hosting services therefore is very important for our current but definitely for our future hosting product offerings.

Content Delivery Network

Innovation for us means that we never take our products and/or processes for granted. We constantly take a critical look at our proposition and our market approach, even when it worked out fine in the past. By this we are taking care of the future hosting needs of our clients. At this moment the people from LeaseWeb are working on multiple innovative projects. They are working on datacenter energy saving projects for example and projects that lets us provide new technologies including the expansion of our existing line of dedicated servers, the development of cloud computing, a CDN – a Content Delivery Network and more tools for our customers to control the services they have with LeaseWeb. Apart from this we are constantly working on the performance of our extensive network, which efforts obviously pay off by having an uptime of 99,999 percent.

In the end an innovative culture within the LeaseWeb company will result in the right hosting products being offered at the right time. Not too early, but certainly not too late. It also means creating a maximum of efficiency in our working processes, so we can guarantee clients our good price/quality ratio also years from now.

The upgrade of LeaseWeb’s Support Department included the hiring of 20 more highly qualified engineers and the improvement of the terms of employment. In addition, all support engineers completed a series of communications training courses to improve their ability to operate in a more customer-friendly manner. These measures have resulted in an impressive 20% increase in the number of “fully satisfied” customers over the past six months.

“Various developments caused our Support Department to become somewhat overburdened at the end of 2008,” says Rolph Haspers, Operations Director of LeaseWeb. “In Q4 2008, LeaseWeb experienced a tremendous growth spurt that had repercussions on the Support Department. This department was facing extra difficulties due to the unfortunate lack of engineers at that time, and the fact that it had too many lower qualified engineers. Also, we are traditionally a highly technology-oriented company, which is not always conducive to customer-friendliness and which became more apparent during this stressful period.”

Hosting Support LeaseWeb: Investments
More than six months ago, immediately after the disappointing support results from the previous customer survey, both short-term and long-term measures were implemented in order to provide the customers with renewed confidence in a positive support experience. Haspers: “The survey results confirmed our gut feeling and we immediately took action. Our short-term measures included the temporary hiring of additional Support staff, partly from the UK. These highly experienced employees were able to relieve some of the pressure and provide effective support to less experienced staff.”

For the longer term, LeaseWeb immediately started looking for more highly qualified engineers in an effort to expand its Support Department with additional permanent staff. Haspers: “This expansion process is still continuing, although the current staffing of the department already has significantly improved the ability to handle peak loads. This positive effect is clearly reflected in the most recent semi-annual customer survey. In addition, six months ago, we immediately decided to relieve the burden on the Support Department in a structural manner through additional investments in automation, among other areas, and by unlinking the provisioning process, i.e. the process of making servers and other hardware available. That should also help to lighten the work load of the department and improve the quality of support.”

Reseller Hosting
Many of LeaseWeb’s customers are Internet professionals or specialists such as system integrators, Web developers and application developers who resell LeaseWeb’s hosting services and integrate them into a total solution. As a result of this particular customer focus, customers have a relatively extensive knowledge of hosting. Support nonetheless remains vital. Haspers: “Hosting has become a commodity for these companies. They have some knowledge of hosting, but they want to have the ability to fully concentrate on the services they provide in addition to LeaseWeb’s basic hosting products. In that sense, support remains vital for them.”

Are there any other needs when it comes to support? Haspers: “The customer survey confirms that we are on the right track and that our quality improvement operation has been successful, but we want to optimize our support to an even further extent. Our focus for the coming six months is to further improve the response and resolution times for issues. In addition, we are continuously working on expanding our engineers’ knowledge, e.g. through additional certification processes, in order to take the customers’ technical support experience to yet a higher level.”

After consideration we decided it was time to heavily invest in more people. But quantity is nothing without quality. So we also increased our demands for knowledge and customer friendliness. To attract qualified support engineers in turn we raised the salaries. For the short term we hired temporary workers, to motivate the current employees as well as to get rid of the back log. At the same time we separated the provisioning of new orders from the Support department. On top of that our programming department started working on an automated ordering process. Something LeaseWeb was actually behind with.

It took some time but in my opinion we really are on the right track. We are starting to see the results of our efforts. Time to reply and time to resolve support issues drastically came down and are monitored constantly and reported on a weekly basis. The provisioning team is working hard to deliver the orders that come in each day as soon as possible to the customers. There is still handwork involved but our core business – colocation and serverhosting – are already highly automated. We have created an automated Operating System install server that at the moment contains more than 5000 physical servers that can be installed with a push of a button – or an xml command coming from the automated ordering system. This has already resulted in customers receiving the login for their servers within 10 minutes after the payment was made via PayPal.

We are happy to get more and more positive comments of our customers about the services we deliver. But we are also reading the negative ones to learn how we can improve our service even more because we realize that completely satisfied customers are the best marketing tool a company can have these days. The happier the customer is the more he/she will communicate this to others on forums, blogs and on Twitter. So please continue to inform us how we can deliver a better service and what you think is missing in our portfolio. We are processing the data of our latest 6-months customer poll and the first results show that we are making good progress.

In the coming time we will continue to focus on more automation especially in the ordering process and the LeaseWeb Self Service Center (SSC) because we know that most of our customers are internet professionals and very capable of doing a lot themselves. If on the other hand you do need personal contact with our people we are ready to help you with your question – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Large hosting provider

Is there a reason for this shift in our client base? Okay, we’re good without a doubt ;-), but apart from that I believe that Enterprises really want and need a hosting partner with some size. LeaseWeb is the largest hosting provider in The Netherlands and we’re a top-20 player worldwide, with one of the few large hosting networks in Europe and lots of bandwidth available. Lately we have grown even bigger, with currently 22,000 servers running and more than 400 Gigabits per second of internet traffic used by our clients, and we are making some noise in the market to show our strengths. May be we’ve reached a turning point in which we’ve become a natural choice for Enterprise clients.

Size Matters

I think the size of partner companies really matters when you’re an Enterprise. As a large hosting partner we’re able to offer Enterprise companies continuity, scale advantages, good connections, green and energy efficient data center facilities, good peering opportunities, redundancy in the network and scalability in their hosting solutions. Together with our top engineering services, server virtualization options, efficient processes, clear and effective procedures, and professional service level agreements, I think this makes us a good enterprise hosting partner.

Does this mean we’ve moved towards managed hosting? Nope, not at all. Managed hosting service is something we preferably leave to our reselling partners. We’re only deploying basic hosting building blocks on which Enterprise companies can freely build their own solutions, services which can be fulfilled by themselves or by their IT supplier.

I hope all the visitors of www.heineken.nl, surely that will be a lot, will enjoy the new features on the site. About 15.000 pilot users where able to give their comments already on the lay-out of the website during the weeks before the official launch, so Heineken was able to perfect the site. Let’s see how many Heineken fans there are and let’s hope they all will enjoy the new Heineken experience…hosted by LeaseWeb.

EvoSwitch, the hosting facility we use, has a Power Usage Effectiveness of 1.6 (yearly). Traditional (and most) data centers have a PUE of around 2.0.� Their goal is to have a PUE of 1.2, something Google claims to have already.

Different business, different options
Google and others have completely different business cases then data centers like EvoSwitch. The way they manage their data centers differ completely from the way we have to. Restrictions on accessibility by clients, being carrier-neutral network data center and more, matter less for data centers Google is running, than a multiple client data center (our clients cannot take the boat to the data center :)). Equipment must be protected properly, but clients must have physical access to the premises as well (have in mind that unlike Google, we have clients with their own hardware and thus they need access). Size also matters. Lowering energy consumption is much easier for smaller data rooms located within a SME, than a large data center.

One of the easiest ways of saving energy is raising the airflow temperature. In the past it was almost mandatory to have an inflow temperature of 21degrees, however server equipment can operate at higher temperatures. We currently use an average temperature of 24degrees and might increase temperature in the future. To be able to raise temperature, you will probably also need to make sure no short circuiting of hot and cold air is possible (see also ‘Cooling a datacenter’). Nowadays you will see concepts like the Cold-Corridors being used more and more. Various options can be taken even with legacy data centers (closing empty racks with covering panels, using efficient Uninterruptable Power Supply (like Delta Conversion from APC)).

Not every technology can be used in all situations. As said before, building a data center in the sea or coal mine is no option for multiple client data centers, but might be an option for compagnies like Google, MicroSoft etc. Using free-cooling (ambient temperature is used for chilling water) can be used in cold countries, but is not an option for example Dubai.

New techniques will become available the next years. What can be used is depending on several business parameters. There is not a ‘one-suits-them-all’ solution. Saving energy remains a pioneering journey for many.

Co-author: Laurens Rosenthal, Innovation Director EvoSwitch Datacenter Netherlands