As part of the company's ongoing commitment to greening its global operations, Sun Microsystems has publicly unveiled three active, new data centers in Santa Clara, California; Blackwater, UK; and Bangalore, India. Put into operation between January and June of this year, all three data centers were built using breakthrough designs and next-generation energy efficient systems, power and cooling. Sun estimates that the company's data center efforts will save the planet nearly 4,100 tons of CO2 per year and trim 1% from Sun's total carbon footprint.
The Santa Clara data center is the largest of the three data centers at 76,000 square feet. Phase One of the Santa Clara project began with a hardware consolidation and refresh project that took three months, increased compute power by more than 450% and is expected to save $1.1 million in energy costs a year. Accomplished in an aggressive 12 months, Phase Two involved designing the Santa Clara space and installing the new hardware. Sun estimates that Phase Two will yield an additional 30% savings in energy costs. Silicon Valley Power, a local utility company, has recognized the breakthrough efficiencies and design of Sun's Santa Clara data center by giving Sun nearly $1 million in rebates and awards.
"There are many projects, big and small, that businesses can begin today to make a difference. It doesn't have to be complicated and the ROI can be larger than you'd imagine," said Dave Douglas, vice president of Eco Responsibility for Sun Microsystems. "We're opening the doors on our new global data centers today to show what's possible in a relatively short time frame and because we believe strongly that sharing is the path to a greener world."
Through its efforts in California, the UK and India, Sun has reduced 267,000 square feet of data center space worldwide into approximately 133,000. On 21 September, Sun held an event for customers at the Santa Clara facility to share best practices from the company's global data center efforts. Building on Sun's heritage of sharing and open source, the company will post key learnings from the project free of charge to help other companies green their own data centers and be kinder to the planet.

Visit www.sun.com/aboutsun/environment/green/datacenter.jsp for more details.
"New standards in data center design and management are not only good for the environment, but they are also good for a company's bottom line," said Sun Microsystems CIO Bob Worrall, who is responsible for reducing Sun's corporate data center energy usage by 20% in fiscal year 2008. "Most CIOs don't even see an energy bill, which makes little sense given that data centers can consume a significant portion of a company's total energy draw. By working together, CIOs and CFOs can direct their efforts to successfully squeeze 'green' into - and out of - the data center." The three new data centers run exclusively on Sun's line of energy efficient products, including Sun Fire T1000/T2000 servers, Sun's x64 servers and the Solaris Operating System.