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Greening the Campus Datacenter
Better for Your Data, Your Budget, and the Planet
 Information technology is a critical tool for tackling environmental challenges. But it's also part of the problem. In fact, datacenter power consumption doubled between 2000 and 2005, according to some estimates. The problem isn't just the impact on the environment. Costs are rising, too. Some analysts say infrastructure power usage will soon cost more than the hardware itself.
This has big implications for higher education. Energy and utility costs for universities have jumped 27.1 percent since 2005, according to the Commonfund Institute's Higher Education Price Index.1
At the same time, the campus datacenter is facing heavier demands that are pushing the limits of power, space, and cooling. Libraries are digitizing their collections, requiring ever-increasing amounts of storage. Students, faculty, and staff expect anywhere, anytime access to online academic and administrative services.
Yet many campus datacenters are housed in aging facilities that lack the latest energy-saving technologies. Institutions are also increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of their datacenters and are under pressure to reduce emissions, energy consumption, and e-waste.
Introducing the Sun Eco Innovation Initiative
Sun can help educational institutions reduce power consumption, environmental impact, and energy costs. Launched on August 21, our new Eco Innovation Initiative gives you energy-efficient tools, documented best practices, methodologies, and a suite of Sun Eco Ready kits and programs — all coupled with the most energy-efficient servers and virtualization solutions on the market.
Together, these resources can help you improve cost and energy efficiency by as much as 60 percent, pack the same compute power in one-quarter of the space, and increase utilization by as much as 85 percent.
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"The cost of operating power servers is going to surpass the cost to buy them in the next five years. When that happens, IT is going to be important to sustainability."
Dave Douglas
Sun VP, Eco Responsibility
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How to Build an Energy-Efficient Datacenter
Wondering how to make your campus datacenter more energy efficient? Sun's approach is a simple, three-step process: assess, optimize, and virtualize.
Step One: Assess
Through our Eco Innovation Initiative, Sun can show you how to measure the efficiency and environmental impact of your datacenter and optimize space, power, and cooling.
Step Two: Optimize
Optimize your existing campus datacenter and/or upgrade your IT infrastructure with Sun's Eco products and services. You'll realize improved performance; space, power and cooling efficiencies, and better economics.
- Sun Eco Optimization Kit: This kit helps you easily upgrade to energy-efficient Sun systems and "green" your campus datacenter. It includes datacenter and storage assessments with up to a 30 percent discount, and programs including up to a 20 percent trade-in value towards energy-efficient Sun servers, blades, and storage. Sun will properly recycle, dispose of, and repurpose your old systems.
- Sun Eco Optimization Service for the Datacenter: This service helps you implement corrective actions outlined by Eco Assessment Services. With multiple site assessments, technical support that includes rack cabinet selection and layout, hardware requirements, vendor coordination, and other options, this service lets you plan and implement long-term changes to your datacenter.
- Sun Eco Cooling Efficiency Service for the Datacenter: Optimization of air-conditioning infrastructure and air distribution is critical, but often overlooked. With this service, we work with you to recover misused capacity and redirect it to other areas of the infrastructure.
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Trade Up to Eco and Save
Trade in qualified Sun and non-Sun systems for discounts on selected Sun eco-responsible systems.
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Step Three: Virtualize
Sun offers an expanded, comprehensive approach to virtualization with new levels of efficiency — both economic and ecological — for the datacenter. Sun's virtualization solutions raise system utilization rates from the industry's current levels of 5 to 15 percent to as high as 80 percent, allowing organizations to decrease the number of servers and costs while increasing capacity.
- Sun Eco Virtualization Kit: This new kit helps you take advantage of virtualization technologies to realize greater datacenter efficiencies in space, power, and cooling. This package includes workshops, special offers, and discounts of up to 20 percent on Sun systems and storage with services to handle the recycling, disposal, and repurposing of old systems.
- Complimentary Sun Solution Workshop: In this two-day session (valued at $10,000 USD), Sun experts work with you to assess your business needs, translate them into technology requirements, and determine next steps. When we're done, you walk away with a high-level TCO analysis to estimate the long-term savings of implementing Sun solutions. (Subject to qualification.)
- Solaris Operating System: The Solaris OS forms the core of our virtualization proposition. Built-in technologies such as Solaris Containers, Logical Domains (LDoms), and Dynamic Domains provide a robust consolidation environment on over 800 different systems from Sun and other vendors. You can use Solaris OS as a guest environment with VMware, providing even more flexibility and choice.
Best Practices and Methodologies for Energy Efficiency
To help customers improve datacenter efficiency and reduces costs and environmental impact, Sun makes available a comprehensive set of best practices, methodologies, white papers, and other resources.
- Sun Energy-Efficient Datacenter Solution Briefs: Sun is "greening" its datacenters, making them smaller and more energy-efficient. We've documented what we've learned at datacenters in Santa Clara, Calif.; Bangalore, India; and Blackwater, U.K. in six solution briefs covering energy efficiency, process/approach, hardware consolidation, cabling, power distribution, and cooling.
- Sun Energy-Efficient Datacenter Reference Guide: This document provides a general overview of how to build energy-efficient datacenters by applying Sun's best practices and technologies. It explains Sun's approach to architecture, consolidation, and virtualization.
- Sun Reference Architecture for Structured and Unstructured Data: A tested, tuned, and integrated data warehouse solution that defines the components needed to support more than 1 petabyte of structured and unstructured data, saving $835,000 in electricity and 4800 tons of CO2 emissions per year, all in a small footprint.
- IDC Virtualization White Paper: Analyst firm IDC outlines how virtualization can be used as a tool for consolidation as well to reduce space and power requirements and extend business continuity to a larger part of an organization's IT infrastructure.
- SB6000 Power Efficiency White Paper: This white paper demonstrates the power and cooling advantages of the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System over similar products in the market today.
- LDoms BluePrint: This Sun BluePrints article will help you learn how to easily and effectively deploy Sun's Logical Domains (LDoms) technology, the most open virtualization technology available today.
You'll find even more resources on the Eco Innovation Initiative Web site to help you identify, measure, evaluate, and eliminate inefficiencies throughout your IT infrastructure.
Services
Studies show that only 50% of datacenter power is used by IT equipment itself. Sun Services offer comprehensive datacenter assessments designed to establish a baseline of existing conditions, identify areas in need of improvement and provide plans for optimizing energy usage, cooling and general environmental conditions. Sun consultants work with you to better understand the current state of your IT architectural efforts and identify ways to save money through greater server utilization, higher compute density, reduced power/cooling costs, streamlined infrastructure and improved manageability.
Questions or comments? Please email education_news@sun.com
1 "Healthcare, energy drive up college costs," CNNMoney.com, August 9, 2006, http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/08/pf/college/cost_college/
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