Jay Littlepage: Life In Balance?

Corporate scale, corporate eco-responsibility
Yesterday I had the pleasure of partnering with Sun VP of Eco-Responsibility Dave Douglas on a Broomfield campus visit by Congressman Mark Udall on the subject of eco-responsibility.  Dave did what Dave does - I can't wait to see him in action after he's been in the job for more than 3 weeks.  My job was to present thin clients.

Now it's been nearly 3 years since my time running Sun's IT Operations but there is to this day nothing that gets me wound up more than Sun Rays.  While they are in increasingly wide scale use it befuddles me that they haven't taken the world completely by storm.  But we've had them in place for quite some time now here at Sun, and it's just a part of how we work.  I can't imagine life without the sunray@home that i'm typing this on.

For our visit with the congressman I looked specifically at the energy savings from our sunray infrastructure.   Here's just a few of the facts I was able to share with my congressman:

Broomfield has just over 2500 SunRay1 thin clients (at 13 watts typical power each) being served by a failover group of v880 servers.  When I added up the energy use to run this config (including the servers) and compared it to the energy we would have consumed if we were outfitted with typical 200w PCs we're saving the planet 1,875 megawatts of electricity each and every year.  That's 7,500 tons of coal that doesn't need to get burned annually, just in Colorado, because we're doing our jobs each day on Sunrays.  The story gets even better when you look at the new 4-watt Sun Ray 2, and our new T2000 servers.  Based upon some early testing with the T2000 by the ITOPS team in Broomfield it seems that we could support the same number of sunrays with half the servers.  And given that the T2000 typically uses 275watts - the energy savings add up (hypothetically in Colorado it would mean another 1,000 tons of coal not burned a year).

I wanted to keep the analysis simple so didn't even look at cooling or carbon.  Even without that we're making a significant impact on the planet - at corporate scale.  To put it into perspective, the day we talked with Congressman Udall a 3.5kW solar photovoltaic system was being installed at his house.  This is great citizenship by the congressman, personal leadership by example.  But it would take 183 such systems operating at full capacity 8 hours per day, every day, to equal the power savings we're getting from our choice of desktops.  Thankfully, it's conceivable that 183 home photovoltaic systems will be installed this year.  But how many corporations are leading by example?  I'm glad I work for one of them, but the planet needs more corporations, cities, and school districts making energy conservation even more of a priority, because they have the scale to make a positive impact quickly.

So if you are reading this on a thin client, thank you.  If not, contact us!


Posted by jaylittlepage ( May 31 2006, 05:38:41 PM MDT ) Permalink

BolderBoulder

Age and cunning overcame youth for at least one more year.  That goes double for the boyfriend who was faced with a pride vs love choice as I started to pull away early in the race.  He made the right choice, and I promise not to remind him about the margin of victory too often...