Sun and Emerson Electric Co., an electrical products manufacturer, announced they will partner to offer businesses technology that improves energy efficiency in data centers. This global sales alliance will have Sun's data center efficiency consultants working directly with Emerson's local Liebert power, cooling and services specialists worldwide to assess, develop and maintain solutions for a variety of customer data center problems. The companies promise to deliver plans along with products and services for improved data center productivity and efficiency.

The companies did not release financial details of the arrangement.

An example of the joint Sun-Emerson Network Power alliance can be seen in Sandia National Laboratories. Sun and Emerson jointly designed an energy-efficient solution for Sandia National Laboratories, which includes Sun Cooling Door systems, Sun Blade X6275 server modules and Emerson's Liebert XD precision cooling technology, which removes heat at the source, requires minimal data center footprint and helps avoid costly data center makeovers.

Sharing the experience, Dr. Robert W. Leland, director, Computing and Network Services Center at Sandia National Laboratories, said, "Right away, we recognized the great value of our association with Sun and Emerson Network Power, and we believe that our collaboration on a new and highly advanced HPC (High-Performance Computing) solution will provide leading-edge performance to our customers with substantially less environmental impact and much lower lifetime cost than the other options we had considered."

Tune in to a podcast on the installation of Sandia's new energy-efficient data center to learn more about the Sun-Emerson solution.

In a past report, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated that U.S. corporations and public agencies spent $4.5 billion in 2006 to power their data centers, and national data center energy consumption could nearly double in the next five years to more than $7.4 billion annually. The power and cooling infrastructure that supports IT equipment in data centers can account for more than 50 percent of total data center energy consumption.

"Data center efficiency is a leading priority for our customers and our alliance with Emerson will help enable us to collaboratively assess a customer's current IT operations and identify opportunities to increase productivity and improve efficiency of the data center," commented Amy O'Connor, vice president of marketing, Sun Services. "Together, we'll help customers minimize capital investments that can be used to fund changes based on the savings from operational costs - an appealing approach in today's economy."

As in the example of Sandia National Laboratories, Sun's Cooling Door solutions are targeted at helping customers conserve energy consumption. The company provides two types of cooling doors, which attach directly to the Sun Blade 6048 Chassis:

• Sun Cooling Door 5600 ~ This energy efficient cooling system for the Sun Blade 6048 Modular System is a rear door heat exchanger. It removes heat right at the source through the use of refrigerant gas technology, leveraging the Liebert XD system cooling infrastructure. Current Liebert XDP (refrigerant/coolant distribution unit) capacity is 160 kW and it will support up to four Sun Cooling Doors 5600. Minimum load for Liebert XDP operation is 32 kW and the maximum capacity for the Sun Cooling Door 5600 is 35 kW.

• Sun Cooling Door 5200 ~ An energy efficient chilled water cooling system for Sun Blade 6048 modular system, the Sun Cooling Door 5200 has a 100% passive design (no fans or electricity required), and is much more efficient than traditional cooling systems. As a passive system, it simply leverages the air movement generated by the Sun Blade 6048 chassis fans so there are no electrical fans. This makes it more energy efficient, reliable and quieter than traditional cooling modules.

Reflecting on the alliance and proposed data center solutions with Sun, Bob Bauer, Emerson group vice president and Liebert global president, said, "Our vision for this program is centered on the enterprise customer who needs to increase productivity, improve efficiency and optimize capital investments. We worked successfully with Sun on numerous technology development projects, including Sun's own data centers. We are looking forward to extending this relationship to the front lines of both organizations to deliver the flexibility and efficiency our joint customers require."

More Information

EPA Reports Significant Energy Efficiency Opportunities for U.S. Servers and Data Centers

Sun Cooling Door 5600

Sun Cooling Door 5200

Sun Blade 6048 Chassis

Sun Blade X6275 Server Module

Sun's Data Center Consulting Services

Emerson Service Overview

Liebert XD precision cooling technology [...read more...]

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