The U.S. Senate passed H.R. 5646 in early December 2006, which directs the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to study the energy consumption of Federal and private computer data centers. Sun was involved in proposing the legislation, along with AMD, HP and Intel.

Sun will contribute to the ongoing study, Lowell Sachs, Sun's senior manager of Federal government affairs explained, so Sun can "look for opportunities where the results can be leveraged into constructive action down the road. In addition to our engagement on these issues in the U.S., we have also ramped our efforts to raise awareness and shape opinion and legislation in the European Union, China and elsewhere. Eco-responsibility is a global goal that will require a global effort."

Baba Sam, marketing director, Sun in India said "India is currently waking up to the reality of electronic waste. There are a lot of environmental groups that are creating a lot of buzz and the enforcement authorities are also clamping down on dumping. Maybe there is a legislation required on the lines of the stringent European Union (EU) standards."

A recent feature article on sun.com by Leslie O'Neill lists some of Sun's products and programs that make an ecologically responsible data center a priority, such as the UltraSPARCR T1 processor with CoolThreadsTM technology, Sun FireTM T1000 and T2000 servers, Project Blackbox, and the PG&E energy rebate program (covered in article [16867]).

Dave Douglas, VP of Eco-Responsibility at Sun talked about future plans Sun has: "We plan to continue innovating across our entire server line. A next step is raising awareness of the eco-friendly advantages of attacking storage with a hybrid disk-tape solution instead of a pure-disk approach. We want to more aggressively go after the efficiency of our own data centers and greenhouse gas emissions, which we've pledged to reduce by 20 percent by 2012."

Podcast on Energy Efficiency in the Data Center

A recent podcast is available from eweek.com featuring Dave Douglas of Sun and Mark Bramfitt, senior program manager in PG&E's customer energy management department. They discuss the high cost of power in the data center and some solutions. [...read more...]

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