A Power Shift — Less Is More

Business as usual has taken an unusual turn. As customer demand for faster, better, and cheaper computing grows, so too does the need for energy to fuel this growth. And the numbers are alarming. According to a recent industry survey¹, datacenter power requirements are increasing an average of 8 percent per year — and power requirements of the top 10 percent of datacenters are growing at an even greater pace at more than 20 percent.

A recent poll conducted by Harris Interactive found that IT executives are increasingly aware of the rising energy costs associated with powering their datacenters, with three quarters of the nearly 200 executives queried saying energy efficiency has become a buying priority.

Two years ago, a Gartner poll revealed that more than 69 percent of datacenters are power-, cooling-, and space-constrained. Since then, servers have only continued to consume more power and generate more heat, and energy prices have soared (by Sun's estimation at 30 percent per year), making this an ideal time to develop a high-performing, energy-efficient datacenter.

The Energy Information Administration² acknowledges that the most rapid increase in demand is going to come from IT equipment. In short, the cost of powering IT infrastructure comes right off the bottom line, which is why IT professionals are now being asked to find more efficient ways to increase computing capacity.

To save potentially millions of dollars on energy bills, companies are looking to high-tech providers to heed the “more performance, less energy demands” call. Positive results will come from a combination of solutions, from consolidating servers to save on cooling and space costs, to lowering energy consumption (and thereby reducing heat) to improve reliability.

Higher Performance with Lower Energy Consumption
Leading the industry in eco-responsible innovation is Sun Microsystems. The company was early to market with its multithreaded CoolThreads processor technology — a breakthrough innovation that packs a server rack into a 32-thread chip. The first systems based on this chip, the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers with CoolThreads technology, have been proven to deliver breakthrough performance while dramatically reducing energy and space consumption. This innovation allows customers to instantly add new capacity to their overburdened datacenters while slashing energy and hardware energy costs.

Sun CoolThreads servers set records for speed, besting competitive systems with up to five times the performance. But more than this, they reset the bar for energy and space efficiency with as little as a fifth the power, a quarter the space costs, and a third the price of competing systems.

To better measure overall server efficiency, Sun has defined a new metric that includes space and power alongside performance in the efficiency equation — Space, Watts, and Performance (SWaP). By Sun's calculations, large enterprises can save millions in power, cooling, and space costs in just the first three years of use of CoolThreads technology. On top of that, if these enterprises consolidate onto Sun Fire CoolThreads servers, they can reduce the number of existing servers by up to 90 percent.

The energy saving benefits of Sun's CoolThreads servers recently led Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) to select the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 server for an exclusive rebate program. The first of its kind, this new rebate program rewards PG&E customers in California who replace power-hungry servers with Sun's innovative CoolThreads servers — cutting acquisition costs by as much as 35 percent.

Try an Energy-Efficient CoolThreads Server
This much performance has never been available in such a compact server, much less one that can save enterprises millions in power and cooling costs. You can see for yourself with a no-cost, no-risk trial of a Sun Fire CoolThreads T1000 or T2000 server.

Run the server for 60 days, and if it doesn't meet your expectations, you can return it at no cost — no strings attached.