Linden Lab is greening up its act by moving servers to a Terremark datacenter:

Now the Lab is moving into newer, greener pastures err … facilities, having closed a deal with Miami-based Terremark to start moving Second Life servers into Terremark’s colocation facilities outside of Washington DC.

…Additionally, Linden Lab is taking advantage of the move to further reduce the per-capita power consumption of the Second Life grid, and the shift to Terremark’s facilities should additionally reduce the ancillary power-consumption.

This move is among the many that company is taking to drive energy efficiency in the Second Life’s infrastructure, which includes doing business with firms that stick to green IT ideals and evaluating technology with an eye toward energy savings, not just performance.

This Linden Lab blog post explains:

But operating “green” infrastructure goes even further than power consumption of our servers. We’re making green a cornerstone principle in our infrastructure scaling plans, and will only be working with data center providers that are also implementing green technologies and standards. We will soon be announcing a data center agreement that will give us a presence in the eastern United States, with an eye toward Europe and Asia-Pacific. Green technologies were a central criteria for the selection of our new data center partner, who has actually collaborated with a local power company to utilize wind power as a supply source for one of their data centers. More on this in a future post…

Finally, we are evaluating and testing a new class of server, which will be using the new Intel Nehalem chipset. My expectation is to begin deploying these servers in conjunction with the commissioning of our East Coast facility in late 2009. These servers will also support our green strategy, as we expect to see a dramatic increase in core processing power, allowing us to host a greater number of regions on a single server.

Source: Massively