Innovate, Act, and Share guides Sun's overall social and eco responsibility programs, it also guides our Eco Innovation Initiative as well
This program has four components targeted at helping customers achieve economic and energy efficiencies:
Eco Products: With a comprehensive portfolio of the most energy-efficient eco products on the market, Sun can enable customers to improve datacenter efficiency and realize cost savings while preserving the environment.
Eco Expertise: Sun has embraced Eco responsibility in our own operations, developing best practices, tools, and expertise — to improve both energy and economic efficiency — that our customers can leverage.
Eco Partners: Sun has a vast network of eco service, infrastructure, application, and utility partners who complement and extend our expertise to help customers architect and implement more energy-efficient infrastructure solutions.
Eco Community: A leader in eco responsibility, Sun works across industries as a voice for IT, building communities, sharing best practices, and open sourcing technologies to enable sustainable prosperity while lessening business impact on the environment.
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Eric Saxe, Staff Engineer
Terry Whatley, Senior Staff Engineer |
Eric Saxe and Terry Whatley are working at the forefront of server design: innovating to create high-performing systems that consume less energy.
"For customers, servers used to be all about the price/performance ratio," says Eric. "But there's been a big shift to performance per watt consumed. Performance is still a very large part of the equation, but energy consumption has become key.
"And this gives us a major technical challenge: How do you deliver the performance that customers demand, while lowering the energy cost? "
"Ultimately, power efficiency must become a design point throughout the system." says Terry. "This means not only building sensors and power saving mechanisms in the hardware, but also power awareness and adaptive policies into the system's software.
"Datacenter server utilization remains low — averaging as low as 15%, as many of the systems remain idle for extended periods. Tackling this is a technical challenge, but an important one."
Terry goes on to say, "At Sun we have shown we can do it. Our Niagara II processor has a number of energy-saving features. It provides customers with double the performance with approximately the same power consumption of the Niagara I, which was already the most power-efficient multithreaded processor on the market."
Eric agrees: "That's pretty significant, but there's a lot more we can do. Sun is uniquely positioned to deliver because we can provide an architecture that integrates the hardware and software. The improvements we've seen so far are only the first few steps."
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