Sun Opens Energy Efficient Data Centre

By Greg McNevin

January 28, 2009: As the market shifts towards more greener pastures, Sun has unveiled the latest in a line of energy-efficient data centres, and the largest data centre consolidation project undertaken in its history.

Opened in Broomfield, Colorado, Sun says that the facility incorporates the latest technology from its portfolio of energy-efficient systems, including breakthroughs in data centre design and power and cooling technologies.

The new facility saw a major hardware replacement program, leading to a 66 percent space compression. In one example, Sun claims it consolidated 63 servers and 30 direct attached storage devices to just two Sun servers.

With this project, Sun estimates it will save more than US$1 (AU$1.5) million in electricity costs and 11,000 metric tons of CO2 per year while reducing its carbon footprint by 6 percent in the US.

The new Broomfield facility follows similar Sun projects completed in Blackwater, UK, Santa Clara, Calif. and Bangalore, India in August 2007. It builds on designs used in Sun's Santa Clara data centre and features water savings, chemical reduction, free air cooling and flywheel uninterruptible power supply (UPS).

"The Broomfield datacenter showcases revolutionary datacenter design with the latest in modularity, scalability and flexibility to drive incredible efficiencies in cost, electricity and overall carbon savings,” said Dave Douglas, chief sustainability officer, Sun Microsystems. “As a company we've achieved our first 20 percent reduction in electricity usage since 2002, and the Broomfield datacenter is a great step forward in meeting our goal of another 20 percent reduction.”

Alongside the new facility, Sun also announced the availability of new data centre efficiency services to help customers retrofit and build more efficient data centres like Sun's Broomfield and Santa Clara data centres.

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