Save Power. Save Space. Save Money. Save the Planet.
With that tagline, Sun Microsystems has kicked off a new green initiative, the Eco Innovation Initiative to help customers achieve economic and energy efficiencies to the tune of 60% in the datacenter. Sun will provide a new suite of environmentally friendly Sun Eco Ready Kits and virtualization
solutions that are designed to increase performance, lower energy use and cut CO2 emissions.
In a case of “leading by example” Sun just completed construction of three new energy efficient datacenters of their own. The datacenters are located in the United States, India, and the United Kingdom.
By their own account, Sun says the facilities have “broken design conventions to maximize space, minimize operating costs, and lessen our impact on the environment.”
According to a press release issued by the company, in 90 days, Sun met the following goals:
- Consolidated 738 storage devices to 225, yet increased storage capacity by 244 percent
- Consolidated 2,177 servers to 1,240, yet increased compute power by 456 percent
- Decommissioned more than 5,000 servers, storage, and networking devices, and as a result, cut energy costs by over 60 percent and saved over $860,000 in the first nine months
- Improved server utilization by as much as 85 percent
- Received nearly $1 million in rebates and awards from Silicon Valley Power.
According to Ovum senior analyst, Ian Brown, “Sun's latest contribution to the green arms race is not too different to what HP and IBM (News - Alert) are already offering in the way of assessment services and assistance in implementing corrective actions.
“There's no doubt that large enterprises are coming up against power and cooling issues in the data center and energy costs are becoming an increasing burden,” he continued. “All CIOs should be looking at energy costs and what they can do to alleviate them —but then their CFOs and facilities managers are probably already talking to them about it. There are obvious first steps they should take around assessment and the leading data-center infrastructure suppliers — Sun, HP, and IBM (not much from Dell (News - Alert) yet) — are all itching to sell their services.”
“The surprise is that IT services vendors have done relatively little in the way of jumping on the bandwagon,” he concluded.
In an effort to help customers take advantage of the benefits of “going green,” Sun is offering a series Eco Ready Kits, which are comprised of the following:
The Sun Eco Assessment Kit
This kit provides a methodical approach to analyzing datacenter energy efficiency, using a combination of assessment services for systems, storage and data center infrastructure. The Sun Eco Assessment Kit is designed to give datacenters a physical exam, uncovering inefficiencies and building corrective action plans for eco-friendly computing.
The Sun Eco Optimization Kit
This offering helps customers optimize, consolidate, refresh and recycle their hardware infrastructure while taking advantage of special offers on Sun systems, storage and services. As part of this solution, customers can upgrade to the Sun Fire, UltraSPARCIV+ and Sun SPARC Enterprise servers, combining extreme optimization, utilization, and reliability in platforms to protect current customer investments.
The Sun Eco Virtualization Kit
This kit offers virtualization solutions that enable better asset utilization and data center energy efficiency. Datacenter power consumption can hinge on system utilization and virtualization enables better asset utilization. At the core of Sun’s virtualization offering is the Solaris 10 OS, including Solaris Containers, which enables companies to securely run multiple software-isolated applications on a single system, in order to consolidate applications onto fewer servers.
Last week, California Senator Barbara Boxer presented Sun Microsystems (News - Alert) with the first corporate Conservation Champion award.
Boxer toured Sun’s Santa Clara, CA (News - Alert) campus and was impressed.
“The tour was mind boggling. We need companies like Sun to make these environmental commitments — Sun is leading the way. And leading by example means that others will follow,” she said.
Sun’s President and Chief Executive Officer, Jonathan Schwartz has been quoted as saying, “It’s more obvious each day that extreme efficiency is good for the environment and great for business. Customers want this same eco responsibility in their datacenters.”
The Eco Innovation Initiative is certainly in line with that thinking from the top. For more on Sun’s commitment to the greening of IT, please visit their Web site.
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Greg Galitzine is Editorial Director of TMC's (News - Alert) IP Communications group, which includes Internet Telephony magazine, IMS magazine and the just announced Unified Communications (News - Alert) magazine as well as the industry's leading Web site, TMCnet.
To read more of Greg’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
To learn more about the state Green Technology, be sure to make plans to attend the Green Technology World Conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center,September 10–12.
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