Sun Rebates Courtesy of California Utility

Utilities have long offered residential customers incentives to buy and
use fewer power-hungry appliances, such as refrigerators and dishwashers.

Now server buyers can get a similar deal in California from Pacific Gas &
Electric.

It won’t be quite as simple as sending in a coupon and receipt, but for
the first time, IT managers will be able to get a rebate when they upgrade to
a Sun Fire T1000 or T2000 servers from Sun Microsystems.

The servers are
based on Sun’s  unique, multi-core UltraSparc T1 processor with CoolThreads released last year.

The rebates will be from $700 to $1,000 depending on the server a company
upgrades from. The entry-level price for a T1000 is $3,995, so the low end of
the rebate still represents a significant percentage of the purchase price.

“We see this as a big endorsement from PG&E of our strategy,” Dave
Douglas, Sun’s vice president of eco-responsibility, told
internetnews.com.

“It’s the first time anything like this has been
done for a server.”

Douglas said for now the rebate process involves the customer calling
PG&E, which has to confirm the system being upgraded before a rebate can be
given.

“We’ve talked to quite a few other utilities and they’ve been waiting to
see how this comes out. Credit to PG&E; they’ve put their money where their
mouth is.”

PG&E used an independent firm to analyze energy use and measure the
potential savings at three different customer sites before deciding to
proceed with the rebate program, according to Douglas.

One customer purchased Sun Fire T2000 servers to install in their 800
square foot data center. Sun said their investment resulted in a savings of
6,413 kWh/year or $770/year per server in savings.

This calculation resulted
in a PG&E Non Residential Retrofit Program incentive of $980 per server.

“PG&E is committed to providing a comprehensive array of energy-efficiency offerings to data-center operators, and we’re pleased to add
rebates for efficient computing equipment to our portfolio,” said Helen
Burt, senior vice president and chief customer officer at PG&E, in a
statement.

Energy and cooling costs in the data center have grown significantly in
the past several years.

HP engineering research released in May estimated that for every dollar of IT spent, a
company can expect to spend the same or more to power and cool it.

As
companies add more performance, they can expect those costs to continue to
rise.

A Gartner poll last year revealed that more than 69 percent of data
centers are power, cooling and space constrained.

Sun estimates the problem’s
only gotten worse since then, with servers consuming more power and energy
costs soaring as much as 30 percent.

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