Data center operations

What makes the salesforce.com cloud so energy efficient? It’s all in the way we designed our multitenant platform and how we manage our data center operations.

Multitenancy

Multitenancy enables our 100,000+ customers to run on a secure, shared infrastructure, creating massive economies of scale not possible with single-tenant, on-premises, or so-called “private cloud” applications. Beyond the impressive cost and business-process benefits of this scalable solution, our customers are also realizing enormous energy efficiency gains.

What does it mean?

While a traditional single-tenant application requires a dedicated set of resources to fulfill the needs of just one organization, a multitenant application satisfies the needs of multiple “tenants” (companies or departments within a company, etc.) using the hardware resources and staff needed to manage just a single software instance. The result: incredible savings in the energy needed to run your IT operations.

Data center management

Our data center partners are carefully selected for their energy and environmental efficiency as well as for performance and are recognized for sustainability best practices. By carefully considering our platform design and architecture, we are able to maintain small hosted footprints within data center facilities around the world.

Power usage effectiveness

The power usage effectiveness ratio (PUE) is a measure of how efficiently a data center uses its power and has a significant impact on the overall carbon footprint. A PUE rating of 1.0 is equivalent to a 100% efficient facility. The typical data center has an average PUE of 1.91. Salesforce.com has a PUE of 1.53, far better than the industry average. We will continue to take measures to reduce our PUE across our data centers worldwide.

Data center efficiency

Thanks to our high transaction volume and large global customer base, we can make the very best choices to improve our PUE and overall data center efficiency. We selected data centers in areas known for low-carbon output power suppliers and optimum delivery performance. Because of the tens of billions of transactions we serve to 100,000+ customers annually, we make data center provider choices as often as we need to achieve the best cost per carbon output to match our goals.