Ask.com jumps on Dell's green bandwagon

Search engine Ask.com is the first corporate customer to join Dell's 'Plant a tree for me' carbon reduction campaign.

The Plant a tree for me programme allows Dell users to offset their carbon intake by paying for reforestation projects.

The company expects to sponsor the planting of "thousands" of trees in an effort to offset the amount of carbon produced powering its operations.

Ask.com is the 181st most popular site on the internet and currently logs roughly .42 per cent of all internet traffic, according to data analysis firm Alexa.

In addition to the tree-planting, Ask.com will be switching over to more energy-efficient servers. The company hopes that the new data centre servers will reduce the amount of power required to run the site by as much as 30 per cent.

Reducing data centre power consumption has become the cornerstone of several high-profile 'greening' campaigns recently. The process typically involves taking data from many smaller servers and transferring it to a larger, more dense modern system with better power management.

Virtualisation also plays a key role in many power-saving efforts because it allows one large system to run in place of several smaller units while still behaving as multiple servers.

IBM is planning to use virtualisation to transfer its data centre from 3,900 servers to just 30. The move will cut Big Blue's data centre power intake by as much as 80 per cent.

HP is undertaking a similar project, looking to cut its data centre from 87 servers to six as part of a larger effort to cut 20 per cent of its emissions by 2010.