OVHcloud has launched a carbon calculator dashboard that reports the carbon emissions associated with its services to users.
The dashboard, first announced earlier this year, gives a total of the emissions associated with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) usage, including the embodied emissions and full lifecycle of the electronics involved.
The tool will be useful for customers who are increasingly expected to report on the Scope 3 emissions of their supply chain, and of partners including cloud providers.
The company showed the dashboard to DCD at a press event in March, and told DCD it is superior to similar calculators those provided by cloud providers including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft Azure.
“They don’t consider the manufacturing impact which is very difficult for them to calculate," said OVHcloud's environmental product manager Aurore Vaudatin at the company’s factory at Croix, near Lille. “We consider all the environmental impacts from cradle to grave. Because of our vertically integrated model, we know all the components in our servers, and can add the manufacturing impact of each component. We also consider the electricity used by your server, with an emission factor based on the electricity source mix of each country.”
The tool is available to all bare metal customers, through a direct link in their control panel, or an API to export data. It will be extended to private hosted cloud customers in the next few weeks.
The information in the calculator is location-based, factoring in the energy mix of the country where a server is located. OVHcloud expects customers will use this to adapt their usage to reduce emissions.
The tool was developed with European software company Sopra Steria, and it has been audited by specialist green consulting firm IJO.
OVHcloud makes its own hardware, and operates a circular economy, in which components are reused where possible. It also has a proprietary liquid cooling system which it claims gives it a global average PUE (power usage effectiveness) of 1.28.
“As a major tech player in Europe, we have a key role to play in supporting a more sustainable digital landscape across the entire value chain, including employees, clients, suppliers, and partners,” said Fabienne Mathey-Girbig executive director corporate responsibility & sustainable development at Sopra Steria.
“We are more than ever aware of the importance for our customers of calculating their carbon footprint as accurately as possible,” said Michel Paulin, OVHcloud CEO. “We are therefore extremely happgy to give them a precise reading and understanding of it, all with a single click of the mouse.”
Communicating online, Vaudatin updated DCD today: “We have already seen evidence of interest from a number of clients who are satisfied with our completeness and transparency.”
