The Value of Being Green

I was at Craigslist recently, and heard they were being kicked out of a hosting facility for being widly popular - in order to serve a massively expanding user base, their growing infrastructure was requiring more electricity than the facility could supply. If you live in California, you know that energy efficiency isn't just a fad - it's a means of driving competitive advantage and flexibility. And keeping costs in line. Just as surges, or poor planning, can leave businesses exposed strategically and financially.

The state also takes energy efficiency seriously - if you drive a hybrid or high efficiency car, you can use the carpool lane on highways. If you put solar panels on your rooftop, you can qualify for rebates. This isn't about political correctness, it's about working within constraints, driving sustainable development and lessening environmental footprints. It's not politically correct, it's economically correct.

So I was particularly pleased to see us announce that PG&E will give rebates to California businesses for jettisoning our competitors products, and replacing them with more efficient Niagara machines, our UltraSPARC T1000 or T2000 servers. We are the first company to have met the requirements that prove the outstanding efficiency of our datacenter infrastructure. Moving off our competition and onto Sun saves money, power, space, and lessens the impact the IT industry has on the environment. And now it's not just us saying that, it's the Pacific Gas and Electric company, the state's largest power utility.

If you ever get asked by a cynic, or your management "what's the real value of being green?," I can give you a very specific answer, at least for Sun. In the State of California, it's worth $700 to $1000 per server. I did say per server. Every single bid we're in across the state just got $700 to $1,000 per server more competitive.

With ASP's under $5,000 for a Niagara machine, that's not a little competitive push.

That's real power.

Posted on 10:10AM Aug 15, 2006 | Comments[16]

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