Sun has won a million dollar (AUD) contract (approximately $875,000 USD) to provide eco-friendly server hardware to Macquarie Hosting. The Sydney, Australia-based Web host and division of Macquarie Telecom, selected Sun over its incumbent supplier Hewlett Packard (HP) in large part due to Sun's ability to significantly reduce the organization's carbon footprint.

In this procurement review, Macquarie not only was concerned with costs and services, but the company also measured the final vendors, which consisted of HP, Dell, and Sun, against a set of green benchmarks.

"...the thing that was different here was criteria around the impact of hardware on our carbon footprint and what that means for Macquarie Telecom," Macquarie Hosting managing director Aidan Tudehope told Australian IT's Ben Woodhead. "That made the evaluation stage very different."

Server virtualization also played a role in Macquarie's evaluation of Sun, Dell and HP, since the company would like to reduce the number of physical servers it needs to operate, Tudehope said.

Under the new agreement with Sun, Macquarie will have approximately 200 Sun Fire X64 servers implemented over the next six months. The new servers are expected to reduce the company's energy usage by up to 60 percent and lower its carbon dioxide emissions by 600 tonnes a year, Tudehope said. He anticipates Sun to bring the company's total emissions down significantly, although he did not identify its total emissions target. The company does expect to improve the efficiency of its datacenter by more than 650,000 kilowatts per year.

"In our experience it's really important to measure the technologies that actually deliver in a range of environments," Tudehope said. "On the basis of our study findings, with an absolute focus on reducing our carbon footprint, we're now moving to Sun." [...read more...]

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