The global business software and technology services vendor SAP managed to reduce energy consumption of its data centers by 13GWh in 2010, according to the year's sustainability report the company released Thursday 24 March. As power consumption of the company's global data center footprint shrunk, the number of employees it supported grew by several thousand.

SAP's chief sustainability officer Peter Graf said sustainability shaped the company's business at all levels. "Our report offers a view into how we are not simply embracing a sustainability strategy, but rather making our corporate strategy sustainable,"he added.

Total energy consumption by SAP data centers went from 147GWh in 2009 to 134 GWh in 2010, while the company's workforce grew by 2,000 employees. Data center energy consumption per employee dropped from about 3,000kWh to about 2,800kWh.

The company said figures in its report were independently verified by the auditing company KPMG.

SAP achieved improvements in data center efficiency by virtualizing the IT infrastructure and by optimizing data center infrastructure systems.

If 37% of the company's servers were virtual in 2009, the number went up to 49% in 2010. SAP increased the virtualization rate of new servers from about 80% to 83%. Virtualization alone resulted in eliminating 1,400 servers. SAP also got rid of more than 2,700 older energy intensive servers in 2010.

The company has established a target to virtualize 80% of its entire IT infrastructure by 2012.

To increase efficiency of cooling and power systems in its data centers, SAP invested in aisle containment, passive cooling, unconverted DC power and thermal imaging.

Electrical systems at SAP's lab in Palo Alto, California, have been converted to use DC power as it gets delivered by the utility. This is different from the traditional practice of converting DC power to AC and back to DC before feeding it to the IT equipment.

Every time power is converted in the chain some of it gets lost and eliminating the amount of conversions that take place increases overall efficiency of the system.

The company implemented aisle containment in its facilities in Bangalore, Shanghai, Regensdorf (Switzerland) and Brussels. Passive cooling was implemented at a Shanghai data center by reducing heat from direct sunlight.

At its Vancouver data center, SAP piloted thermal imaging and software-based monitoring of electrical use by the facility. The pilot was launched to see whether the solutions would be viable in other data centers.