Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Story Details

Every day, thousands of organizations worldwide benefit from Sun's environmental stewardship and eco-responsible solutions that offer high performance and lower power, cooling, and space requirements. Sun itself is no exception. In 2006, Sun launched an initiative to move out of its Newark and Sunnyvale, California facilities and consolidate the product development business administrative datacenters based at those locations in new, high density, next-generation datacenters at its Santa Clara, California campus. To meet space and budget targets, which were linked with energy-saving and environmental goals, Sun needed to compress the datacenters and their supporting server and storage systems into 61 percent less space.

Sun’s Global Lab & Datacenter Design Services (GDS) organization was tasked with leading the effort to compress the existing datacenters, and to design and build the replacement datacenters in Santa Clara. To make matters more complicated, Sun had to vacate one of its Newark buildings and 83,000 square feet of datacenter space within a few months, well before the Santa Clara space would be available. There was no time to complete new or temporary construction to make up for the lost datacenter space, and security and cost considerations ruled out co-location solutions. It was time to take a different approach to the problem, based on replacing the datacenter server and storage systems with Sun’s latest and most capable technology.

The Sun GDS team had already been developing a hardware replacement program that enabled massive compression. Earlier, smaller projects in the U.K. and the U.S. had yielded more than 90 percent compression in square footage and 50 percent reduction in utility costs.

GDS set out to apply the lessons of these projects on a much larger scale. They identified 2,177 servers and 738 storage devices as candidates for replacement. 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. They also replaced a variety of older systems with servers based on UltraSPARC IV+ and multi-core AMD processors performing at more than four times the processing speed. The overall server replacement equated to a 456 percent compute performance increase using less than half the number of original servers. In addition, the benefits of the Solaris Binary Compatibility guarantee proved itself again, with no issues upgrading applications to Solaris 10.

The hardware replacement produced similar benefits on the storage front. The GDS team replaced older disk arrays with Sun StorageTek 3000 (3510 only) and 6000 series arrays that have high-performance 144 gigabyte Fibre Channel drives. Capacity increased 244 percent even though 70 percent fewer systems are deployed.

The new server and storage systems decreased the overall lab power consumption by over 60 percent.

Overall, the hardware replacement allowed Sun to reduce lab space by 88 percent, avoid more than $9 million in construction, infrastructure and power costs, and project a 100 percent payback in three years. Results of this magnitude may seem extraordinary, but they are replicated every day by Sun customers worldwide.