3Par is going for the green sysadmin by promising to offset storage purchases to make them carbon-neutral.

For every terabyte sold in 2007, the company will purchase carbon credits to compensate for its disk drive products' greenhouse gas emissions, it has said.

3Par estimates it will buy four petabytes worth of such carbon offsets, enough to fund clean energy projects that will reduce carbon emissions generated from approximately 700 cars and eight million pounds of CO2. It will buy the offsets from a company called TerraPass.

That company's website states: "When you buy a TerraPass, your money funds renewable energy projects such as wind farms. These projects result in verified reductions in greenhouse gas pollution. And these reductions counterbalance your own emissions."

3Par's CEO, David Scott, says that his company's thin provisioning -- the supply of disk storage as it is needed rather than the total assigned to an application -- also helps customer's reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. "With thin provisioning and the 3Par Carbon Neutral Program, 3Par customers not only save significant energy costs associated with power and cooling the storage environment, but they also exercise environmental responsibility," he argued.

Scott has previously said that the initials EMC stand for "emit more carbon".

In effect, 3Par's products now have an added green tax, which 3Par is subsidizing out of its profit. TerraPass is a company that says "absolutely not" to suggestions that purchasers of its passes are buying a license to pollute. Its for-profit status however demonstrates that there is money to be had in providing green credentials.