Greenqloud: Cloud Storage Startup From Iceland Promises To Be Greener Than Amazon Forest

With everything moving to the cloud owing to the high level of mobility, many startups continue to step forward with new takes on cloud computing to compete with Amazon’s huge and popular cloud services. Factors like efficiency, ease of access, and affordability are key, but eco-friendliness is also one of the credentials your service needs to have to keep up with the times. While some users may not know the difference, corporations do see advantages for making more ecological choices. Greenqloud, a cloud storage startup from Iceland comes forth as a user and an eco friendly cloud storage service. In their own words, Greenqloud focuses on IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) alongside putting greater efforts to offer HPC (high performance computing) compatible cloud that academic and scientific communities can use for scientific calculations.

Cloud storage has definitely made life easier. Think of having your data stored on self purchased or rented hardware that was costly, not readily scalable and with hundreds of servers for hundreds of firms across a countless locations, it proved to be quite inefficient in terms of energy. What cloud has done is rid consumers (corporates and individuals alike) of the worry associated to what hardware hosts their data and how to scale the same. With Greenqloud, the focus is on the same idea along with being a lot more environment friendly.

Greenqloud makes use of renewable hydro and geothermal energy. By doing so, it reduces the carbon footprint of storage to a greater degree. While this may still not be as green as the Amazon Forest (literally) it is definitely one of those steps in the right direction to make our computing infrastructure more environment friendly.

The pricing is quite affordable, though it is largely based on the amount of storage you utilize. You can start off with $10.95 per month (the minimum). You can modify the pricing based on the amount of storage, bandwidth to computation power you require for the setup. The idea is definitely one that is required and cloud is where our storage is heading over to. What is interesting is how do these service add value to the consumer experience. Scalability is definitely not an issue when it comes to the cloud and the major issue or concern lies with security of data and eco- friendliness. That’s the consumer side, as for the service providers, it is of utmost importance how do they profit from the same?

While the numbers is what does the trick here, factors like monthly fee, costs, etc are all factors that might help you win or lose users. Focusing on Greenqloud, it will be interesting how the startup performs in the current economic scenario in Iceland.

We were able to find some useful insights or plans that were shared by Greenqloud’s CEO, Eirikur Hrafnsson back in 2010. The service was launched on a small scale in the fourth quarter of 2010 and is in beta as of now. Plans also included reaching “break even” in two years of operation and eventually becoming profitable by year three. The cloud storage startup initially raised half a million dollars from angel investors in Iceland.

The idea is definitely novel, and it will be interesting to see how Greenqloud progresses.