Sun Microsystems, in collaboration with APC-MGE, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Hitachi Data Systems and Wipro Infotech has announced a new eco consortium to address the growing issues of limited power, space, and energy, in a climate of increasing demand for performance and utilization. The consortium is part of Sun Microsystems' new Eco Innovation Initiative designed to enable customers to tackle the datacenter eco issues of cost savings and energy efficiency.

The alliance will edify customers on technology infrastructure, practices and methodologies that can help them cut costs, use less space, improve performance and efficiency and “green” their business on their own.

APC -MGE a leading provider of global, end-to-end solutions for real-time infrastructure has been a longstanding proponent of an energy efficient environment. They will provide know-how of datacentre infrastructure architecture as a potential solution to address power and cooling issues, wherein AMD will offer its advanced energy efficient computing technologies which will help customers reduce business energy costs substantially.

Hitachi's breakthrough green storage solutions deliver improved utilization of storage assets, which significantly reduce power consumption and improve IT efficiencies within the data center. Wipro's expertise in system integration and consulting will provide customers options of scalability in the same footprint and help translate technology into business solutions.

New Datacentre

As part of the company's ongoing commitment to greening its global operations, Sun Microsystems also publicly unveiled an active, new datacenter in Bangalore . Put into operation in February of this year, this datacenter along with two others Sun built in Santa Clara , California and in Blackwater , UK , was built using breakthrough designs and next-generation energy efficient systems, power and cooling. Sun estimates that the company's datacenter efforts have already saved the planet nearly 4,100 tons of CO2 per year and trimmed 1% from Sun's total carbon footprint. The new datacenters house Sun's line of energy efficient products, including Sun Fire(TM) T1000/T2000 servers, Sun's x64 servers and Solaris(TM) Operating System. Through this datacentre, Sun has reduced 10,400 square feet of datacenter space into approximately 5,096 square feet, saved nearly $100K in utility costs in first 6 months and reduced power consumption by 17%. This combined with the worldwide consolidation efforts have reduced the companies datacenter portfolio by over 200,000 square feet resulting in millions of opex reductions. This new datacenter also received top honors from PCQuest magazine's “Best IT Implementation of 2007” beating out 250 submissions. “This datacenter is based on Sun POD approach which simplifies datacenter design and allows for the maximum efficiency while incorporating flexibility, functionality and scale.” said, Ramesh KV, Regional Workplace Manager that designed the datacenter and manages the APAC datacenter portfolio for Sun. “This approach has given us the ability to turn on a dime, it is a competitive weapon.”

Speaking at the launch, Mr. Mike Douglas, Head- Field Marketing, Sun Microsystems said, “ In the context of power and energy consumption, doing more with less is the new diktat for the corporate world- one can no longer separate the environment and the business, today what's good for the environment is imperative for business, especially a technology-driven business. The Eco Innovation Initiative reinforces Sun's track record of innovating around Eco design points and also emphasize the expertise and best practices we've developed as a result of consolidating worldwide datacenters and investing in Eco Responsibility.

“Sun has been one of the first organizations to define a ‘green' strategy, having delivered a microprocessor called Niagara (UltraSparc T1) that is three to five times more efficient than its nearest competitor. Having set the tone for the future of eco friendly computing, this consortium is yet another step in that direction and together we believe that we can do our bit to ensure a greener India,” he further added.

Mr Bhaskar Pramanik, President- India GEM, Sun Microsystems India said, “ At Sun, eco responsibility starts at home- we are not only at the forefront of defining industry best practices, but we are also following our own recommendations. The new data centre in Bangalore provides ample proof of this. Indian CIOs like their global counterparts are too facing the heat of problems related to energy and space and these problems are going to only get magnified as we make our progress and mark in the world economy. With this consortium we are hoping to raise awareness on the environmental aspects of running a business and with it promote the concept of eco responsibility.”

Alok Ohrie, Managing Director, AMD India, said, "At AMD, we recognize that leading the world to energy efficient processing is about more than just the products we create. It is about building bridges between government, industry, and NGOs around the world to encourage energy efficient policies, incentives, and standards. We stand by Sun Microsystems and their initiative to serve one of the most critical needs of our customers, technology partners, and users."

“As data growth explodes and eco issues come to the fore, we are pleased to partner with Sun Microsystems to offer customers an eco-friendly and socially responsible approach to data center management,” said Natarajan Viswanathan, Managing Director of India, Hitachi Data Systems. “Hitachi Data Systems provides customers with storage products, solutions and services that help them reduce space, power and cooling costs through improved storage utilization. Additionally, Hitachi deploys environmentally friendly methods to design, manufacture, and support storage infrastructures throughout their entire lifecycle.”

“APC-MGE is happy to have partnered with Sun in setting up their state-of-the art data center in Bangalore . We understand the power and cooling challenges faced by the CIOs as a result of server consolidation and compaction. APC-MGE solutions address the data center challenges of space, cost of operation, energy consumption and cooling, while delivering high efficiency. The focus is on ensuring efficiency at both hardware and datacenter design and management level, while reducing the total cost of operation. As part of this Eco Initiative consortium, we hope to create greater awareness for greener data center by promoting higher energy savings and efficient data center management” said Pankaj Sharma, President, APC-MGE India.

Dr. Anurag Srivastava- Vice President, Consulting Division Wipro Infotech said, “ Wipro focuses on assisting organisations develop practical, workable and energy efficient solution to optimize their existing IT infrastructure. We are very happy to be associated with this consortium as this will help us reach out to a larger audience and edify them on making their datacenter green and optimize their productivity and efficiency.”

The Eco Innovation initiative builds on Sun's Eco Responsibility efforts of the past year with its industry leading product technologies and the Solaris 10 operating system. The Sun Eco Innovation Initiative provides customers a simple, clear, actionable way to engage Sun's innovative, open Eco products, expertise, partners and community to use less energy in their datacenter, reduce IT footprint and minimize operating costs: Assess, Optimize, Virtualize.

Sun software products provide record-setting performance to help increase energy savings and datacenter efficiency. The Solaris OS enables customers to maximize availability by increasing resource utilization by up to 80% and allowing hundreds of virtual environments to run on a single operating system instance. The Solaris power management project (Project Tesla) was recently released as part of Sun's ongoing contributions to the OpenSolaris community. Sun Ray Software delivers a virtualized desktop to eco-friendly Sun Ray clients that consume only four watts of power.

Sun also recently announced the UltraSPARC T2 processor -- the most energy efficient processor on the market. At one-tenth to one-thirtieth the power consumption of competitive offerings, the UltraSPARC T2 processor sets the gold standard for green computing and efficiency, combining the industry's lowest power consumption with double the cores, 16 times the threads, 4 times the throughput, with on-chip network and security functionality. Sun is also driving eco-efficiency into the data center with its UltraSPARC T1-based systems. With as much as 3x the throughput at half the power and space consumption, Sun's SPARC Enterprise/Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 systems deliver breakthrough performance and dramatic space and power efficiency.