Steadfast Green Data Centers

Carbon offsets are just the beginning.

Steadfast Networks is offsetting it's carbon footprint for all base operations (staff commuting, office usage, core infrastructure, networking equipment, shared/VPS/backup services, e.g.) and gives the option to all customers not fully covered (dedicated server and colocation) a quick and easy option for offsetting their own carbon footprint. In addition, we are busy working with various partners and vendors to be as environmentally responsible as possible. We encourage employees and customers alike to reduce their carbon footprint and take internal actions to assure we're running efficiently and in an environmentally friendly manner. The actions taken are varied and cover a wide array of our operations. Hopefully what we are doing can give you some ideas as to how to reduce your own carbon footprint and if you have any more ideas for us, always feel free to contact us.

Carbon Neutrality/Carbon Offsets

Steadfast Networks has partnered with Carbonfund.org, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that is highly certified. Hundreds of organizations including Volkswagen, Staples, Dell, and Motorola have chosen Carbonfund.org because of their strict auditing, transparency, and industry recognition. We feel that working with Carbonfund.org gives us and our customers the best value for our money and the transparency/reporting to confirm this. As proof, you can view our certificate here.

Highly Efficient Facilities

The facilities used by Steadfast Networks are highly engineered to assure utmost reliability and efficiency, which results in a significantly reduced carbon footprint. All Steadfast Networks facilities follow the hot aisle/cold aisle data center design, which assures the most efficient use of cooling resources. In a hot aisle/cold aisle design, you only cool the intake air going into the systems, and then are able to exhaust the higher temperature output air. This leads to greater efficiency as you're not cooling exhaust air and the higher air temperature of the exhaust air allows the cooling units to more efficiently remove the heat from the air. Facilities are also operated at 72 degrees, which is slightly higher than most other facilities, and the reasoning is outlined in a blog post.

The newest Steadfast Networks facility, 725 S Wells in Chicago, also has other environmentally friendly features. These features include both air side and water side economizers, both methods which use outside air to help cool the air and chilled water. This use of "free cooling" is still relatively new in the industry, but can produce significant energy savings, reducing power used by cooling systems by nearly 50% and reducing the water needed by the system by nearly 30%. In addition, the UPS systems being used are highly efficient, 98% efficient at full load, and Starline busway systems are used to help reduce overall power loss in the distribution phase.

Public Transportation/Commuting

Steadfast Networks has partnered with the Chicago Transit Authority to help make public transportation a cheaper and easier option for our employees. We have joined the Transit Benefit Share Program and with the help of that program, roughly half of our staff gets to work via foot, bike, or public transportation. In addition, we also allow non-critical office staff to telecommute, working from home. This combination of efforts not only helps the environment, but reduces traffic congestion and is a direct benefit to our employees.

Local Vendors

Steadfast Networks purchases 90%+ of all equipment from local vendors, primarily Amadi Systems. This is not only an advantage to have things stocked locally to get them quickly, but also significantly reduces the distance traveled for deliveries. This also allows us to have our servers delivered by our vendor directly, meaning we can get the systems bare, with no additional packing material. This reduction in packing material significantly reduces the amount of trash produced by our facility and also allows our existing staff to work more efficiently by not needing to spend the time unpacking.

Highly Efficient Systems

Steadfast Networks is always on the leading edge of technology, which now means using the most power efficient systems on the market. We were one of the first to market on the extremely low power Atom based servers, the new lines of multi-core Xeon processors, and Intel solid state drives. These new lines may cost a little more upfront, but they offer significant improvements as far as processing power per watt, meaning we have a lower operational cost. As an example, an Atom 330 based system will have a ~15% performance increase over a 3.0Ghz Pentium 4 system while using 1/3 the power. The Intel solid state drives have IO performance equivalent to ~10 15k RPM SAS drives, but uses less than 1/8 of the power of a single SAS drive. The power being saved is tremendous and allows us to pass on better pricing to our customer, but also greatly reduces our carbon footprint.

Efficient Product Offerings

Not only does Steadfast use efficient systems, but we offer them in an efficient manner. We offer the full range of services, from shared hosting, to VPS, to dedicated servers, to complex multi-server clusters. Our goal is to find you the solution that best matches your needs and by fitting you into the solution that best fits your needs you'll both save money and reduce your environmental impact. Our concern is to have a long lasting relationship with our customer, not to up-sell them to something they do not need. This is both a major benefit to the customer, but also to the environment. By being able to have a dedicated processing core on one of our VPS nodes instead of having your own dedicated server, you can easily reduce your impact on the environment by 50% or more, even over a highly efficient Atom based system.

Recycling

Steadfast Networks was pivotal in creating a building-wide recycling initiative, to assure that cardboard and paper products building-wide were able to be easily recycled. Now, nearly all paper and cardboard is properly separated to assure as much as possible can be efficiently recycled. In addition, all networking equipment, servers, workstations, e.g. are recycled. We either find additional uses for them internally, strip them to re-use the parts individually, or donate them to charitable use. If you are aware of any charitable causes looking to take older computer hardware please contact us, as we're always looking for more partners.