Could green hurt co-lo?

His company has integrated facilities and IT well, so the CIO sees the power bills and has an incentive to reduce them. He also can compare the efficiency of data centre services the company integrates in its own data centres, with what it buys in from co-location services.

However from his perspective things don't look so rosy for the co-los. They don't cut their electricity bills, because they can charge it on to customers. Also co-los don't provide the kind of investment that would reduce overall power long-term, and don't meter the electricity individual companies use, so there's less incentive to use lower-powered ones.

Further to this, they don't always provide the reliability measures that you'd expect from a large provider, for example in back-up power. The co-lo has enough diesel generators to power the data center during a power outage, with two spares... but in the last outage, two of those generator failed. So my friend's business transactions carried on, but one more generator down, and he'd have been losing business.

As far as he can see, co-lo is a waste of money. He needs to lower his carbon usage - for basic cost-saving and because of legislation. He could move to a more efficient co-lo, but he's big enough to build his own, and he can make his own choices about what he needs. That part is quite important: he can look at the Uptime reliability Tiers and choose which part actually helps make his system more reliable.
His key issue here with co-lo is it involves other customers. Not all of them will want to pay for measures that increase reliability, or cut emissions. Co-lo vendors I've spoken to say the same thing: it's costly for them to comply with requirements like the EU Code of Conduct or Uptime Tiers to data centres - because they can only be implemented across the whole facility, and not everyone wants that.
So is co-location really in danger because of the shift to green? I'm sure our friend here may have the resources and the need to build his own data centres, but co-location and other forms of outsourcing are a good option for companies that are too small to build their own, and are in the wrong place to build one that is green (eg. heat), or who simply do not see that as a requirement they need to concentrate on.

DCPSOL specialise in the design and build of both new "green" data centres, and retro-fitting existing facilities within shell and core environments. http://www.datacentreprojectsolutions.com