Our story...

The Recycled.Cloud project is the result of two observations made by e-Durable in the last 5 years that it has just completed:

• The heavy trend in the ICT industry in recent years is to move clearly towards more and more cloud computing. Digitalisation goes hand in hand with an inevitable movement towards the cloud, supported by the largest players in the sector and because of the economic and technological advantages that the cloud brings to businesses.
• At the same time and for decades, medium or large players, companies, cloud providers or even SMEs have very often bought new servers when setting up their projects and - due to a lack of time or space - discarded existing servers, appearing incompatible with the new versions, no longer benefiting from manufacturer support or simply perceived as obsolete. This behaviour contributes to a huge production of IT waste that is certainly used but still works well. At least some of their components are perfectly functional.
  

The impact on the planet is therefore considerable when you consider that the manufacture of a server represents nearly 600kg of CO2 emitted per unit (source: ADEME, 2012) and that more than 11 million units were delivered in 2018 (www.statista.com).

Based on this observation, e-Durable has therefore launched a reflection on the subject and has come up with the concept of Recycled.Cloud. The principle of this cloud is to recover the servers that companies were throwing away until now and had to have removed at their expense, to rebuild servers that can be used with the components that are still valid and sufficiently powerful for the cloud. To offer with these recycled servers a credible and solid local alternative, based on this 100% local cloud, 100% recycled to host the "Cloud" services that companies in the region need today to support their digitalisation.

To go further, Recycled.Cloud of course recycles again the servers of its own cloud that would fail by extracting their valid components, and this until the end of their useful life, extending them as long as possible, only to then bring them into the SWICO waste treatment chain.

To keep on a consistent course, the Recycled.Cloud is also powered by open source technologies such as OpenNebula and OpenStack, OS Cloud (Cloud Operating System) which runs more than 70% of the world's public clouds. The design of Recycled.Cloud is also based on the principle of an architecture that is as distributed as possible and thought is being given to the design of mini-clouds that will allow the concept to be extended to a local community of distributed hosting and recycling companies.

Thanks to a few generous donors of used servers, the founders and engineers of e-Durable have invested massively over 24 months to develop their know-how, to create and test the first prototypes and then to put into production the first Recycled.Cloud cores on the Lake Geneva arc and in the heart of the Swiss Alps.

At this stage of the project, e-Durable's vision is to continue to expand the Recycled.Cloud, with passionate and selected customers, to increase the ecological impact of recycling used servers to a larger scale and to offer all local actors Cloud hosting and services of the highest possible environmental value.