Sun's Green Efforts Teach a Lesson - Page 2

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Many cool ideas

Typical datacenter design is to put large cooling systems at the corners of the room and use fans to blow the air into the space below a raised floor. Instead, Sun used cooling towers from American Power Conversion, which stand at the end of the row and look like another rack in the system, and Liebert, which are secured over the computers and blow cold air down as needed.

This way, you don't do one size fits all for cooling. These systems ramp up and down their cooling based on the source of heat and the load it senses. By doing this with the Santa Clara datacenter, Sun was able to cut its electric bill in half, said Nelson.

Sun focused on modular "pods," which include racks that have power, cooling and connectivity, making it a room inside of a room. Most datacenters tend to be rolled out in one fell swoop, which often results in companies deploying a datacenter that doesn't match spec, or can't get enough power. In some cases, they overbuild. Do it incrementally instead, said Nelson.

Secondly, facilities and IT need to be combined. One person needs to straddle the line between the building housing the datacenter and the computers inside. Most firms split the responsibilities between two different units.

"If you don't have someone in my job you need one," said Nelson. "You need to translate between real estate and IT groups because they have conflicting interests. Real estate is behind cost savings. They don't want to build if they don't have to. IT on the other hand wants to build things."

Through its datacenter consolidation efforts around the world, Sun reduced its global footprint by 60 percent. It reduced greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. by 23 percent, surpassing its goal five years early.

Sun has set a goal of a 20 percent further reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2015, and the Broomfield datacenter alone reduced its U.S. output by six percent.