As an avid reader of The Planet Blog, you’ve probably noticed some consistency in the 164 articles published here since Doug’s inaugural “Welcome to The Planet’s blog… I think?” post on May 14, 2007. We focus on our company culture, support, data centers and network to help you step through the looking glass and get an inside perspective on our business. With a continuous stream of changes and improvements, it’s tough to feature even a fraction of the work our team is doing to improve our service, so we keep an eye out for opportunities to “show” what we’ve “told” you about in the past. This is one of those opportunities.

On September 2, 2008, we announced the results of our lights-out energy efficiency initiative. A few days ago, I was sorting through a batch of data center pictures, and I came across a few great examples of what this news looks like in practice:

This is Phase Two of our H1 data center. With all the posts you see from H2 and D6, you might be curious about what our other data centers look like, so hopefully the picture above doesn’t surprise you. We have extremely high standards for our data centers, and you should expect the same enterprise-level quality across the board.

If you took a guided tour through H1, you’d see it all lit up as it is above. If you walked in during a normal DC shift, you’d probably find it a little different:

When the data center is unoccupied, the lights are switched off to save energy. How much energy? Well, across the board, we estimate the program saves more than 1.4 million kilowatt hours in a given year – or about $140,000 in power bills. It’s no small change.

As you’ve seen in our other posts about data center innovation and operational efficiency, we take a common-sense approach to energy conservation. It’s incredible to see the significant impact such simple changes can make.

It’s also pretty cool to see servers glowing in the dark:

-Kevin