Green Data Storage & Backup

Behind the Cloud Is an Energy-Consuming Datacenter

For customers, cloud solutions can offer many economic and technical benefits, including not having to build out additional infrastructure.  While that may reduce your own infrastructure and carbon footprint, the cloud is driving a massive datacenter build-out that is far from green.  The EPA estimates that about two percent of all power consumption in America comes from datacenters.

According to new stats from Greenpeace, the average datacenter’s energy requirement is increasing to nearly 100 MW of power–enough energy to power about 80,000 U.S. homes.  In the context of energy availability, a large coal plant or huge solar thermal plant can produce only 500 MW of power. A 100 MW data center would consume a significant portion of the output of a large power plant.¹   Symform takes a more sustainable approach to delivering cloud solutions with its decentralized green data storage network.

Symform Eliminates the Energy Requirements of Datacenters

• Consumes minimal energy with a globally distributed cloud network leveraging existing infrastructure, bandwidth, and energy use
• Requires no datacenter build-out
• Reduces your carbon footprint and meets Green IT initiatives
• Complies with SSAE 16, validating the reliability, operational controls, and security of the distributed network
• Receives contribution from all network members, using existing, excess onsite storage capacity

We’re Not Saying Datacenters Are Evil

Just to be clear: datacenters often serve a vital purpose. Datacenters are the only way to fulfill the needs of certain applications, such as high transaction database applications, for which the data and application logic needs to be in close proximity for high performance and low latency throughput. Even Symform uses datacenters for Cloud Control, the smart brain that orchestrates the Symform Cloud Storage Network, but we still strive for green data storage. The amount of data we are storing in a datacenter is a tiny fraction of a percent of the overall data in the Symform Cloud Storage Network, and an even smaller fraction of the datacenter usage of comparable cloud solutions.