Macquarie Telecom moves to reduce carbon footprint

Review of data centre’s carbon footprint prompts Macquarie Hosting to change Sun

Macquarie Hosting moves to Sun Microsystems in rolling contract initially worth $1M - Change will drive up to 60% less energy usage

Sydney, 4th December 2007 - Macquarie Hosting, a division of Macquarie Telecom has selected Sun Microsystems as its preferred data centre supplier for servers following a complete procurement review based predominantly on ‘green’ criteria.

In a positive step further asserting Macquarie Telecom’s commitment to ‘greening’ its DSD and ISO 27001 certified data centre, the Intellicentre, the organisation has committed to a rolling contract initially worth $1 million for the installation of a further 200 Sun Fire X64 Series servers.

The move is expected initially to improve efficiency of Macquarie Hosting’s data centre energy consumption by more than 650,000 KW per year. This equates to over 600 tonns of CO2 emissions, according to Energy Australia calculations.

The review follows six months of energy consumption monitoring across the data centre with the greatest sources of power consumption revealed to be servers, switches, firewalls and air conditioning units which contributed over 85% of the total cost of operation.

“There’s a lot of vendor hype around green IT in the market at present. In our experience it’s really important to measure the technologies that actually deliver in a range of environments. On the basis of our study findings, with an absolute focus on reducing our carbon footprint, we’re now moving to Sun,” said Aidan Tudehope, Managing Director, Hosting, Macquarie Telecom.

Sun Microsystems was selected following a ‘like for like’ comparison of servers from a broad range of vendors including Dell and HP. CPU speed was the prevailing benchmark with parallel energy consumption compared across the board. In the assessment, Sun servers running both AMD and Intel processors proved to be up to 60 per cent more energy efficient than other vendor technology.

In the past six months, Macquarie Hosting has seen demand for enterprise virtualisation rise from 20 per cent to 50 per cent in new customer installations. As companies reliant on critical applications increasingly look to implement realtime infrastructure, Sun’s Fire X64 Series servers were a logical match in Macquarie Hosting’s procurement strategy as they are designed, built and optimised for virtualised enterprise environments.

“The move to overhaul our procurement strategy according to green criteria is part of Macquarie Hosting’s commitment to greening our supply chain and in-turn reducing our energy consumption and impact on the environment,” Tudehope said.

“We are finding more and more customers are aware of the green IT agenda and are asking what Macquarie Hosting is doing about environmental issues in response. We’re committed to staying on the front foot in our approach and this initiative is just another step on the journey.”

Additional assessment criteria in Macquarie Hosting’s procurement review included price, availability of new technologies and the quality of direct customer service provided by each vendor.