Eco Products and Services
We're creating entire server product lines with increased energy efficiency – and customer demand for these systems continues to grow.
CoolThreads Systems
In 2008, Sun rolled out a new generation of servers and blades. The CoolThreads product line is designed specifically for energy and space efficiency.
In fiscal 2008, revenue for Sun Fire and Sun SPARC Enterprise servers with CoolThreads technology surpassed a $1 billion annual run rate, once again doubling from the previous year.
Datacenter Efficiency
During 2008, we helped improve the efficiency of several customers' datacenters. For example, retail group Bahrain Mercantile and Maritime International (BMMI) halved the size of its datacenter by consolidating its Windows and other systems onto energy-efficient Sun Fire servers – and expects a return on investment in just 12 months. Media and entertainment company SearchForce has improved system response time by migrating from Dell and Linux platforms to Sun servers running the Solaris 10 OS – and realized a 70% decrease in power consumption.
Sun Modular Datacenter
Customer interest in the Sun Modular Datacenter, widely known as Project Blackbox, continues to be robust. The Sun Modular Datacenter S20, introduced in October 2006, was the first container-based computing infrastructure available in the world. In September 2008, we introduced the Sun Modular Datacenter D20, enabling worldwide deployment of a broader range of equipment and applications. Customers have successfully used the Sun Modular Datacenter for datacenter augmentation, high-performance computing, Web-scale deployments, data warehousing, disaster recovery, mobile computing solutions, and other applications.
The Sun Modular Datacenter deploys 10 times faster than it takes to build a conventional datacenter and can save as much as 40% on cooling costs in one-eighth the space. During fiscal 2008, the Sun Modular Datacenter was successfully deployed at customer sites in the United States, India, China, Russia, and other locations around the globe.
In fiscal 2008, Sun increased deployment of our Sun Ray thin client devices, leading to $25 million in savings due to lower energy, staffing, and systems costs.
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Measuring Product Energy Use
To monitor and improve energy efficiency, we submit product energy-use data for benchmarking against other products. We're the only vendor to submit our energy measurements (in watts) to more than one official benchmark each year. The benchmarks for UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors are available here:
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Product Innovation and Stewardship
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We now also report energy use and performance for x64 servers on VMmark and SPECjbb 2005 benchmarks.
In addition, we use , and we report power usage for all Sun systems and power-supply readings for all our servers and storage.
Materials
Eco responsibility plays a role in what materials go into Sun's products. We consider the recyclability of the materials we use and take steps to ensure we don't use processes or substances, like glues or other bondings, that may inhibit disassembly. We also have specifications in place to ensure that restricted substances don't find their way into our products and a dedicated staff who tracks requirements for substance restrictions to see that we remain in compliance globally.
Packaging
Product packaging is a crucial aspect of our customer service. Finding materials and methods to protect the product and the environment is a challenge, and our Worldwide Operations team is reviewing our packaging strategy. We'll report our progress in fiscal 2009.
Global Product Takeback
Our is improving and expanding rapidly throughout the world, encouraging customers to return old Sun equipment to be reused, remanufactured, recycled, or disposed of safely. We endeavor to comply with all relevant laws and regulations, including the European Union Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive.
We encountered a number of challenges as we attempted to collect and analyze our Global Takeback program data for fiscal 2008. As a result, and to ensure we only publish data of the highest integrity, we have chosen not to publish any fiscal 2008 data associated with our Takeback Program. We'll continue to refine our data collection processes so that we can transparently report both successes and challenges. Toward this end, we have set a number of data collection and reporting goals for fiscal 2009.
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