Sustainable IT | Ted Samson » Sun celebrates green datacenter innovations and tools

August 22, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Sun celebrates green datacenter innovations and tools

TAGS: Cooling, Energy conservation, Green technology, Server virtualization, Sun

As part of its Eco Innovation Initiative, Sun shined a green-hued spotlight on its massive datacenter consolidation efforts yesterday and unveiled a host of tools and services to help datacenter operators inject some energy-efficiency and eco-friendliness into their own facilities.

At a high level, Sun's boasting significant benefits from the massive undertaking, most of which affected its datacenters in Santa Clara, Calif., but also its Blackwater, UK, and Bangalore, India sites.

In Phase One of the project at its Santa Clara site, Sun consolidated 2,177 servers down to 1,240. For example, they replaced 88 Sun Fire V880 systems with 58 Sun Fire T2000 and T1000 systems yielding a 91 percent reduction in datacenter floor space and a 60 percent reduction in power costs.

The company also consolidated 738 storage devices down to 225; and 550 racks down to 65 (reaping 88 percent compression of square footage). Power-wise, the company is shrinking consumption from 2.2MW to 500KW, which will result in an estimated $1.1 million cost savings per year.

In Phase Two, which entailed a new datacenter design, build-out and deployment, the company went from 254,000 square feet of facility space to 127,000, and it expects to reap another 30 percent in energy savings.

Sweetening the effort: Sun's enjoying nearly $1 million in rebates and awards from Silicon Valley Power, including a one-time $250,000 cooling innovation award, the first award of its kind given by the utility.

Sun estimates that the company's datacenter efforts will reduce its CO2 production by 4,100 tons per year, trimming 1 percent from the company's total carbon footprint. (The latter stat is pretty interesting; most companies don't get quite so detailed as to the size of their footprint.)

One of the most intriguing aspects of Sun's new datacenter design is its pods: modular, scalable clusters of racks or benches that have the same requirements. The design will enable Sun to easily and quickly swap in and out racks, as well as deploy modular power, cooling, cabling, and monitoring equipment. Planning for future growth, Sun designed server racks to support a capacity of up to 30kw per rack.

There's a lot more detail about the modular design and other technologies and practices Sun employed on the company's Web site. I recommend that you watch Sun's Energy Efficient Datacenter Tour on the company Web site. It's pretty interesting and informative, and not too market-y, either.

In addition to showing off its shiny new datacenter facilities, Sun unveiled several products and services to help companies wring more energy efficiency out of their own datacenters.

Among them, Sun unveiled three Eco Ready Kits: The Sun Eco Assessment Kit, The Sun Eco Optimization Kit and the The Sun Eco Virtualization Kit.

The Sun Eco Assessment Kit "provides a methodical approach to analyzing datacenter energy efficiency, using a combination of assessment services for systems, storage, and datacenter infrastructure."

The Sun Eco Optimization Kit is designed "to help customers optimize, consolidate, refresh, and recycle their hardware infrastructure ... ."

The Sun Eco Virtualization Kit "offers virtualization solutions that enable better asset utilization and datacenter energy efficiency," according to Sun.

Additionally, Sun announced its Eco Services Suite, which encompasses four offerings:

• The Sun Eco Assessment Service for Datacenter, Basic, which is intended to help customers maximize power and cooling efficiency in the IT infrastructure running Web-based services;

• The Sun Eco Assessment Service for Datacenter, Advanced, "a comprehensive datacenter service providing a technical evaluation of datacenter energy use, cooling capacity, rack placement, air distribution and other environmental factors";

• The Sun Eco Cooling Efficiency Service for Datacenter, aimed at helping companies "recover misused air conditioning capacity and direct it to the areas where it is needed";

• and the Sun Eco Optimization Service for Datacenter, through which Sun provides direct assistance with implementation of corrective actions outlined in the Eco Assessment Service.

Posted by Ted Samson on August 22, 2007 12:38 PM

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