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.
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