Angus MacDonald, chief technologist for Sun Microsystems, Australasia, has put together a slide presentation that he calls "The Future of the Eco-Datacenter," which investigates the increasingly pressing conjunction of ecology and economy as it affects the datacenter. He talks about the tension between demand and capacity and ways around these conflicts, such as increasing utilization, improving space efficiency and cutting energy costs.

Sun's role in pursuing a solution to this confrontation, MacDonald reports, is threefold: Innovate, Act and Share. The slides point out just how pervasive ecological thinking is in the Innovate segment and how sustainability is key to the Act segment, with such programs as the Open Work Program for Employees at Sun with flex locations and flex offices. The role of datacenter design and modularization is also a critical element in the Act segment.

The Share segment begins with the basic element of datacenter design blueprints and building relationships with ecologically minded partners as well as through such channels as OpenEco.org and strategies for efficient datacenter operation that measure relative effort against relative payback. The development of datacenter performance measures is also an important element in the Share segment, which MacDonald illustrates with examples from Sun's own datacenter design and build at Santa Clara.

MacDonald concludes with a recommended three-step approach to improving datacenter efficiency:

• 1 Assess the current state of datacenter operations.
• 2 Optimize operations by upgrading to energy efficient Sun systems.
• 3 Virtualize to make the best possible use of IT investments.

On the same site as MacDonald's slide presentation is another entitled "Let's Talk Technology Segment," which refers to his three-step approach and then asks what can be achieved by following it and what does an entity do to realize the potential improvements. "Let's Talk" is a mini version of MacDonald's longer presentation, covering much of the same ground. [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter