August 21, 2007 - Today, Sun is announcing its Eco Innovation Initiative to help customers improve economic and energy efficiency in the datacenter by as much as 60 percent. The initiative includes a new suite of environmentally friendly Sun Eco Ready Kits and virtualization solutions that can increase performance, lower energy use and cut CO2 emissions, without enlisting an army of consultants.

The power consumed by datacenters has doubled from 2000 to 2005. In fact, some analysts predict that the cost of energy to power the IT infrastructure will surpass the cost of hardware by 2010.

In response to this trend, Sun's Eco Innovation Initiative provides customers a clear, actionable approach to improving datacenter efficiency and reducing the datacenter's impact on the environment.

Leading by Example

Sun just finished building three new energy efficient datacenters in the United States, India, and the United Kingdom, and more are planned. We started by assessing, optimizing and virtualizing our IT environment. The resulting facilities have broken design conventions to maximize space, minimize operating costs, and lessen our impact on the environment. Sun's own recent datacenter redesign resulted in a dramatic reduction in space and utility requirements, without sacrificing performance. In 90 days, Sun achieved the following:

• Consolidated 738 storage devices to 225, yet increased storage capacity by 244 percent
• Consolidated 2,177 servers to 1,240, yet increased compute power by 456 percent
• Decommissioned more than 5,000 servers, storage, and networking devices, and as a result, cut energy costs by over 60 percent and saved over $860,000 in the first nine months
• Improved server utilization by as much as 85 percent
• Received nearly $1 million in rebates and awards from Silicon Valley Power.

Learn more about how Sun achieved tremendous savings with the new datacenter design and how you can save too.

Today, Sun is sharing with customers its best practices for improving efficiency in an eco friendly way. Customers can use the same, simple three-step process to improve efficiency in their datacenter. It worked for Sun, and it can work for you.

1. Assess Your Datacenter: Sun has resources available that you can use to measure the current efficiency and environmental impact of your datacenter, or we can do it for you. Based on the results, we can recommend ways to optimize space, power, and cooling for better efficiency and utilization across your IT infrastructure.

2. Optimize Your Infrastructure: Customers can upgrade their old equipment to new models that are the most energy efficient and powerful systems possible. Sun systems can deliver improved performance, power and cooling efficiencies as well as provide additional capacity in your facility.

3. Deploy Virtualization Technologies: Sun's virtualization solution is built upon industry-proven virtualization technologies – from desktop, to server, to disk and tape, and includes the free and open Solaris OS that runs across more than 890 Sun and non-Sun systems and has built-in virtualization and Predictive Self-Healing features. These products, combined with innovative programs, tools, services, and strategic partnerships can help customers achieve greater utilization, greater manageability, and significant savings, while bypassing power and space limitations.

Environmentally Friendly Sun Eco Ready Kits

As part of its Eco Innovation Initiative, Sun is also announcing a new suite of Sun Eco Ready Kits to help customers accelerate their energy and cost savings activities:

The Sun Eco Assessment Kit
The Sun Eco Assessment Kit provides a methodical approach to analyzing datacenter energy efficiency, using a combination of assessment services for systems, storage and data center infrastructure. The Sun Eco Assessment Kit is designed to give datacenters a physical exam, uncovering inefficiencies and building corrective action plans for eco-friendly computing.

The Sun Eco Optimization Kit
The Sun Eco Optimization Kit helps customers optimize, consolidate, refresh and recycle their hardware infrastructure while taking advantage of special offers on Sun systems, storage and services. As part of this solution, customers can upgrade to the Sun Fire, UltraSPARCIV+ and Sun SPARC Enterprise servers, combining extreme optimization, utilization, and reliability in platforms to protect current customer investments.

The Sun Eco Virtualization Kit
The Sun Eco Virtualization Kit offers virtualization solutions that enable better asset utilization and data center energy efficiency. Datacenter power consumption can hinge on system utilization and virtualization enables better asset utilization. At the core of Sun's virtualization offering is the Solaris 10 OS, including Solaris Containers, which enables companies to securely run multiple software-isolated applications on a single system, in order to consolidate applications onto fewer servers.

Learn More

Sun's approach to Eco Responsibility has already had a measurable impact on its own business, enabling the company to cut costs and reduce CO2 emissions. Sun has a vast network of Eco service, infrastructure, application and utility partners, that complement and extend Sun's expertise to help customers architect and implement more energy-efficient infrastructure solutions.

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 sustainability and lessen the impact of buisness on the environment. To find out more about Sun's commitment to Eco Responsibility, go to the Eco Resource Center.