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Sun’s Mark Monroe on energy efficient data centers

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Sun made an announcement the other day about the opening of its new Broomfield data center.

It sounded like they had done a superb job so I asked Sun’s Director of Sustainable Computing, Mark Monroe to come on and tell us a little more about the project.

Some of the highlights of Sun’s announcement were:

  • Greater space efficiency: A scalable, modular datacenter based on the Sun Pod Architecture led to a 66 percent footprint compression, by reducing 496,000 square feet from the former StorageTek campus in Louisville, Colo. to 126,000 square feet;
  • Reduced electrical consumption: By 1 million kWh per month, enough to power 1,000 homes in Colorado;
  • Reduced raised floor datacenter space: From 165,000 square feet to less than 700 square feet of raised floor datacenter space, representing a $4M cost avoidance;
  • Greener, cleaner architecture: Including flywheel UPS that eliminates lead and chemical waste by removing the need for batteries, and a non-chemical water treatment system, saving water and reducing chemical pollution;
  • Enhanced scalability: Incorporated 7 MW of capacity that scales up to 40 percent higher without major construction;
    Innovative cooling: The world’s first and largest installation of Liebert advanced XD cooling system with dynamic cooling controls capable of supporting rack loads up to 30kW and a chiller system 24 percent more efficient than ASHRAE standards;
  • Overall excellence: Recognized with two Ace awards for Project of the Year from the Associated Contractors of Colorado, presented for excellence in design, execution, complexity and environmental application.
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Mark Monroe, Sun’s Director of Sustainable Computing talks Green!

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Mark Monroe is Sun Microsystems‘ Director of Sustainable Computing. I had a chat with him the other day about Sun’s thinking around Green IT.

We discussed Sun’s new Santa Clara data center, their pod architecture and their Project Black Box among other things!

Mark had some interesting numbers to share, including the fact that in their Santa Clara data center, they reduced the size of the data center from 202,000 square feet to 76,000 square feet and the number of racks was dropped from 550 to 65 while reducing thier power requirement and increasing the compute capacity!

Towards the end Mark referred to two links on the sun site for further information, they were sun.com/blueprints and sun.com/ecoinnovations.