This week I watched with interest India's launch of their first lunar orbiter, the Chandrayaan-1. My favorite part of any launch is watching Ground Control go from absolute, deadly-serious silence to uncontrolled, jumping joy when their rocket leaves the tower and earth's atmosphere. The success of the mission is down to the knowledge and expertise of this team on the ground. They may never be famous or fly into outer space but without their collective know-how and experience the Chandrayaan-1 would not be a reality.

I was thinking how similar this is to what happens with our Professional Services team. They've taken our leading datacenter technologies like the Solaris 10 OS, LDOMs, and CoolThreads, with our over 25 years of expertise in datacenter strategy, design and build to create Sun's Datacenter Efficiency Practice.

This is because we've found our customers facing a space, power and cooling crunch - not enough floorspace for their expanding datacenters, not enough throughput/power to meet current and near-future performance demands, and utility costs and cooling costs sometimes exceeding the cost of server acquisition. And while many companies faced the same types of datacenter problems, we knew that the solutions need to be tuned to each company's unique business and IT requirements. So we start with Datacenter Strategy Consulting to review our customer's datacenter floorspace, cooling facilities, power requirements, hardware and software, network, and security needs. We then can recommend retrofitting and optimization of current datacenter, or a Sun Modular Datacenter (the always cool Project Blackbox) or building a new facility (like we did, check out this video about our own energy-efficient datacenter in Santa Clara).

And once you have an expert datacenter strategy, you need expert datacenter design. Sun uses a modular or "pod" design that groups racks having the same requirements. Pods create a standard within the datacenter that make the design repeatable and scalable for future growth. We design all our datacenters, whether retrofitted, modular or a new build-out, with energy-efficient equipment and technologies, and green building design concepts. Datacenter Build also means installation and configuration of equipment and readiness services. At its completion your datacenter maximizes space utilization, maximizes energy-efficiency, and minimizes costs.

Sun's Datacenter Efficiency Practice - think of us as the Mission Control to your successful datacenter launch. This is the rocket science of data centers.