Sun Microsystems (Oracle) - USA
As part of the company's ongoing commitment to greening its global operations, Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle) unveiled three active, new data centres. Put into operation in 2007, three data centres (located in California, the UK and India) were built using energy saving oriented designs and next-generation energy efficient systems. The largest of the three is located in Santa Clara, California.
Sun Microsystems estimated that by adopting a sustainable approach, the space required for the data centres was reduced by 80%.
Similarly, the ecodesign of the centres allowed for the cutting of electrical and cooling costs by 50% compared to average data centres. The energy savings corresponded to 4,100 t of CO2e savings per year, i.e. about 1% from Sun's total carbon footprint.
Efforts were focused on data centres in California, the UK and India. In particular, the conception of the data centre in Santa Clara has been divided into two phases.
- Phase one: hardware consolidation. This phase aimed to increase compute power by 450% and save $1.1 million in energy costs a year.
- Phase two: designing of the Santa Clara space and installation of the new hardware. This phase aimed to create an additional 30% reduction in energy costs.
Following the construction of the Santa Clara data centre, Sun held an event for customers in the facility to share best practices from the company's global data centre efforts. Building on Sun's heritage of sharing and open source, the company posted key learnings from the project free of charge to help other companies green their own data centres.