Centers that house computer servers and store data aren’t friends of the Earth.
Between 2000 and 2006, data center energy consumption more than doubled in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Consumption exceeded that of all the country’s color televisions.
Sun Microsystems has spent the past 41/2 years rethinking the industry.
On Monday, Sun unveiled its latest effort — a data center in Broomfield [Colorado] projected to save the company more than $1 million in electricity costs and 11,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year.
The data center consolidates 496,000 square feet of space at the former Storage-Tek campus in Louisville into 126,000 square feet. That will help Sun, which has been praised for encouraging telecommuting, reduce its U.S. carbon footprint by 6 percent.
Tom Plant, director of Gov. Bill Ritter’s Energy Office, called the project an “amazing accomplishment” that exemplifies the governor’s plan to reduce emissions of global warming gases 20 percent by 2020.
It also was born out of pragmatism.
“We wanted to get our portfolio (of technical space) under control (economically),” Dean Nelson, Sun’s senior director of global lab and data center design services, told the dozens of people at Monday’s event. “We didn’t do it (only) to save the planet.”
Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun, like other U.S. companies, is under economic pressure and last week issued layoff notices to 1,300 employees, including 195 in the Broomfield area, two months after announcing plans to cut up to 18 percent of its work force.
The Broomfield data center builds on innovative designs introduced in Sun centers in Santa Clara, China, Czechoslovakia, India, Norway and the United Kingdom.
The centers are based on a generic modular or pod design that enables components to easily be plugged in, with higher densities achieved as technologies advance. For example, 63 servers and 30 storage devices were compressed…