Everything we do at Midori is engineered with sustainability in mind. From the power we consume, to the land we build on, our goal is to tread lightly and leave a small footprint on the only planet we call home. And we are not “greenwashing” a previously carbon-intensive business here, like many data centre providers desperately trying to retrofit sustainability to a deeply unsustainable operating model. Let’s look at some of the fundamental principles of the MidoriDC model:

Land use 

The sites we select for our public cloud nodes are all “brownfield”, whether in urban, suburban, or rural environments. This means that we don’t build on land that could be better used for growing food. Some of our sites are in existing industrial facilities, while others, such as our biomass-powered sites are on farms.

Power sources

The primary power sources for all our sites are all renewable. Today, that means a mix of solar and biomass, but in the future it will include wind, hydroelectric, tidal, green hydrogen and other technologies yet to commercialized, like small modular reactors.

Backup power comes primarily from high-capacity batteries, but where we do use grid power as a backup, we buy exclusively on green tariffs.

An added benefit of this approach is that all our sites have multiple redundant power sources, which are not only independent of one another, but use completely different technologies. This from a power standpoint, we have higher site availability than most commercial data centres in the world today – without the need to fall back on polluting fossil-fueled generators.

Power consumption 

Having evaluated server technology from a variety of established OEMs, most of which, even if marketed as edge computing solutions, are essentially cut-down traditional data centre class hardware, we concluded that they were all too power-hungry for our purposes.

We therefore partnered with an Australian company that has more than 20 years’ experience in building high-performance compute clusters from low-powered ARM-based micro-servers. The MidoriCloud “Pod A” is the first example of this technology that we are deploying and many more like it will follow. A fully populated Pod A contains a total of 240 micro-servers, and even if all these servers are running at full capacity, the pod draws less than 3 kW/h. Even our high-end GPU-based Pod B draws less than 10 kW/h.

This low power consumption makes us completely independent of the grid (which in many countries is already overloaded) and enable us to place our cloud pods just about anywhere we can get network connectivity.

Midori (which means “green” in Japanese) is truly green down to its very DNA.