Consolidation and Virtualisation - good for business, good for the environment

The green debate is high on the political, consumer and business agenda. Never before have companies been so encouraged to be eco-responsible and help reduce carbon emissions.

At the same time however, organisations are faced with increasing data volumes, regulatory and compliance requirements, and growing applications. Constrained by time and resources, many IT departments are simply adding more hardware.

But if your business goal is to tackle cost and complexity, improve server utilisation and reduce energy consumption then the old one-server-per-application rule is no longer an option.

That's why more and more organisations have turned to virtualisation and consolidation.

Virtualisation helps TelstraClear and AFG slash power consumption and IT costs

For the past decade, Sun has worked with customers around the world to help them consolidate and virtualise their data centres.

In fact, Sun's virtualisation technology has helped businesses:

• Reduce IT costs by as much as $2 million per year
• Achieve 99.99 per cent availability
• Double application performance
• Increase asset utilisation by as much as 80 per cent
• Speed time to market for new services

Locally, New Zealand telecommunications carrier TelstraClear used Sun's virtualisation solutions to consolidate its mail environment.

The company cut data centre costs by reducing server hardware from four racks to one utilising Sun Fire T2000 servers that require half the power of competing solutions.

Australia's largest mortgage broker, Australian Finance Group, achieved savings of 50 per cent in power and cooling costs when it deployed three Sun Fire T2000 servers to consolidate the systems supporting its core broking business application.

And with a 50 per cent increase in system performance, the company is reaping the financial benefits of increased productivity for both staff and customers.

As a technology company ourselves, Sun is always looking for ways to innovate and reduce data centre costs. Through virtualisation and consolidation Sun has slashed its IT costs by more than $US10 million.

»Watch this short video and learn how we achieved these savings

Virtualisation and Consolidation: turn your business green

Sun understands that each business faces a range of unique set of challenges to reduce power consumption and slash cost and complexity. That's why we don't take the "one size fits all" approach to consolidation and virtualisation.

We believe consolidation and virtualisation can deliver benefits across your entire business. That's why our range of eco-responsible solutions address every part of the data centre, from servers, desktops and storage through to software and practices.

Sun's UltraSPARC T1 CoolThreads processor powers the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers, and draws about as much power as a household light bulb.

With the best performance per watt of any processor available, Sun outperforms competitors' systems and delivers up to twice the performance, using one third of the energy and half the space.

Our Sun Ray thin client desktop solutions are the eco-friendly alternative to power hungry desktop and laptop computers. Sun Rays offer green technology at the desktop and consume only 4 watts of power - less than 5% of the 80 watts that a regular PC uses.

Per desktop per year this saves you around $100 in electricity costs. For 100 desktops, you could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 tonnes per year.

As for green storage solutions, data that resides on tape consumes no power and can be moved offsite. Therefore, many organisations are increasingly considering the role of tape virtualisation for cost and eco effective storage.

For more information on Sun's eco-responsible solutions, as well as tips and tools on greening your IT environment, check out Sun's Eco centre.

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» Calculate the energy of a server by using the SWaP (Space, Watts and Performance) metric

» Keen to look into eco-friendly technology but unsure if it's right for your business? Test and evaluate our systems risk free in your own environment with Sun's try and buy program - a no cost 60-day trial of our latest technology

» Check out Sun's server consolidation resources and learn more about Sun's approach to virtualisation