GreenQloud Enters U.S. Market With Digital Fortress

GreenQloud, the cloud company committed to renewable power, has entered the U.S. market and announced its first infrastructure outside of Iceland. The unique cloud company selects data center locations based on the availability of renewable power in order to reduce the exponentially increasing amounts of CO2 generated by IT equipment. It found a match for its needs with colocation provider Digital Fortress in Seattle, where it will launch a new availability zone in the first quarter of 2014.

Customers will now be able to select whether to have their data geo-redundant through the US and Iceland, or only redundant through the Iceland data center locations. GreenQloud will also offer private and hybrid cloud solutions, which it began offering in Iceland as well.

"Providing compelling cloud solutions powered by renewable energy is core to GreenQloud's mission of making the cloud easy-to-use, cost effective and green," said Bala Kamallakharan, the CEO of GreenQloud. “Using Digital Fortress and creating a separate and independent operation in the US meets our stringent renewable energy requirements while enabling US-based companies -  who require their cloud provider to have data center locations in the US -  to utilize GreenQloud's server hosting, storage and syncing solutions.”

Digital Fortress offers a renewable green energy source through Seattle City Light, along with low Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and high availability of fiber and fiber providers - which were all instrumental factors in GreenQloud's choice og Digital Fortress as its primary data center provider in the Pacific Northwest.

“GreenQloud is leading the cloud industry in adopting renewable energy resources to power the cloud,” said Paul Gerrard, CEO of Digital Fortress. "We are proud to be GreenQloud's data center provider for their expansion into the Northwest to better service their US customer base.”

GreenQloud has a European Availability Zone in two 100 percent renewable energy-powered data centers in Iceland on the Verne Global campus. GreenQloud was founded in 2010 and is privately funded by Icelandic investors and has won several government grants.

While cloud computing is more environmentally friendly than locating these workloads in inefficient server closets, there's still a long way to go in making them greener. The biggest cloud, Amazon Web Services, currently only has two renewable energy options: Oregon (US-West) and AWS GovCloud (US) regions offer 100 percent carbon-free power.