Sun Microsystems has launched an initiative to help manage and, in the longer term, reduce the energy demands of data centers. It's one of the biggest issues facing data center managers today, as the recent growth of liquid and even CO2-cooled servers confirms.

The Santa Clara company has called on the IT industry to work with Energy Star to drive improved energy efficiency in data center web servers at the energy-efficiency group's Enterprise Servers and Data Centers: Opportunities for Energy Savings conference, which finishes Wednesday.

Together with US EPA, AMD, end users and other industry leaders, Sun wants to discuss practical avenues to improving the efficiency of data centers as well as work to define industry-standard metrics for energy efficiency. Even small improvements in web server energy efficiency hold the promise of massive savings, said Sun.

Energy efficiency experts, end users and IT leaders with a clear interest in addressing the issue of increased power-use in data centers will share case studies, participate in workshops and discuss roadblocks to energy efficiency and drive toward identifying solutions at the conference. Sun will also discuss its recently-announced measurement for the next generation of the Internet: the new Sun SWaP (space, wattage and performance) metric that assesses the efficiency and effectiveness of rack-optimized server deployments in a data center.

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