<http://makower.typepad.com/joel_makower/2005/11/sun_shines_a_li.html>

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**Sun Shines a Light on Efficiency**

**November 14, 2005**

Add Scott McNealy to GE\'s Jeff Immelt among business leaders trying to
turn sustainability into a big business opportunity.

With great fanfare, McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, announced on
Monday the introduction of a new energy-efficient processor that will
debut in a new line of servers by the end of the year. The company is
calling the chip \"the world\'s first Eco-responsible processor.\" Its
research shows that its UltraSPARC T1 processor \"could eliminate the
number of Web servers in the world by half, slashing power requirements
and having the same effect in reducing carbon dioxide emissions as
planting one million acres of trees.\"

This is no small matter. While a great deal of focus has been on
reducing the energy use of consumer electronics, such as PCs and TVs,
far less has gone into the energy impacts of server farms \-- facilities
housing massive computing storage and routing wizardry used by Google,
eBay, Yahoo, and just about any other Web site that maintains a
database, performs e-commerce, or facilitates e-mail, Internet
telephony, music streaming, and all the rest. Server farms require
energy to operate all that electronic equipment, and gobs more to keep
the equipment cool. A typical data center can consume nearly 4,000 watts
per square foot \-- roughly 15 times what they consumed in the early
1990s, and more than half the power required by many homes, according to
the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-Conditioning
Engineers.

I couldn\'t find any reliable data about the aggregate energy used by
today\'s server farms, let alone projections for the rapidly scaling
future, but the load for an individual farm can be significant \-- and
costly. Here\'s a flavor, culled from a [2001 C\|net
article](http://news.com.com/2100-1017-257567.html?legacy=cnet): When
U.S. Dataport, a company in San Jose, Calif., planned a \$1.2 billion
server farm \"that would be the world\'s largest data center,\" it
called for \"10 huge air-conditioned warehouses on 174 acres that would
constantly draw 180 megawatts of electricity \-- about enough to provide
energy for all the homes in a city the size of Honolulu.\"

Aloha, oy.

The major server manufacturers \-- Sun, HP, IBM, Dell, and others \--
have been vying to improve server energy efficiency for years; the
2000-2001 energy crisis in California, where roughly one in five servers
lives, was a giant impetus. But Sun seems to have ratcheted up the
competition a notch or two.

I won\'t claim to be able to parse such [marketing
tech-talk](http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T1/) as \"With up to
32 simultaneous threads in one incredibly low-power, low-heat processor,
you gain the high-volume throughput you need, while saving millions on
power and cooling costs.\" But some of those present at Monday\'s Sun
event were able to help add credence to Sun\'s pronouncements. One of
those was Amory Lovins, CEO of Rocky Mountain Institute, which in 2003
convened an innovative whole-system [design
charrette](http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid626.php) \"to challenge the
current model for data centers and develop a groundbreaking data center
design \-- a clean-sheet model with no compromises.\" The result was a
data center design concept \"that reduces energy demand by an order of
magnitude (89 percent) compared to today\'s standard designs, while
providing equivalent computing power and greater reliability,\"
according to the RMI site.

Like GE, which through its [ecomagination
campaign](http://makower.typepad.com/joel_makower/2005/05/ecomagination_i.html)
has harnessed sustainability as a key sales and marketing strategy, Sun
sees its energy-sipping chips as part of a larger strategy that can
drive sales and revenue. Sun\'s strategy involves all but eliminating
the PC altogether.

McNealy has long been championing Sun\'s \"thin-client\" strategy, in
which individuals log on to a server that contains, in effect, their
desktop, including all of their programs and documents, just the way
they left them. That strategy \-- McNealy calls it DOIP, for \"Desktop
Over Internet Protocol,\" eliminates much of individual computers\'
innards \-- hard drives, memory chips, fans, and more. (Thereby
eliminating, as McNealy puts it, \"a personal space heater on
everybody\'s lap or workspace.\") And it means not having to upgrade
your hardware every time Microsoft (or whomever) introduces a radical
new operating system or software suite; the latest version lives in the
server. It also facilitates \"commute-free remote access work
environments for employees,\" enabling employees to work from anywhere,
thereby eliminating office space (about half of Sun\'s employees don\'t
work from company offices). That saves even more energy and improves
worker productivity.

It\'s a great strategy that, for sustainability buffs, approaches the
goal of radical resource productivity \-- one of the four tenets of
\"natural capitalism\" described by Lovins, et al., in their [book of
the same
name](http://www.greenbiz.com/reference/bookstore_record.cfm?LinkAdvID=140):

*Increasing resource productivity means getting more product out of each
ton of natural material extracted. Changes in technology can create ways
to stretch natural resources 5, 10, even 100 times further than they do
today. And these resources savings can easily save money and increase
profits.*

Natural Capitalism also talks about the \"service and flow\" economy,
which also seems to synch with Sun\'s thin-client vision.

*In a solutions-based business model, the producer maintains ownership
of goods produced, which encourages \"take back\" when the productive
life is over, remanufacturing and recycling. This requires different
expectations for both customers and producers, and fundamentally shifts
the relationship between the two. Thus, basic economic arrangements
support closed loop production and consumption models.*

Make no mistake. Sun Microsystems is a long way from being a model of
natural capitalism, or even a wholly sustainable business. But I like
their thinking. And they offer another example of a large company seeing
the profits to be made from making its customers more efficient while
reducing their environmental footprint \-- and saving them money along
the way.