Server efficiency draft released; Going green pays

This week, the data center industry group working on a standard for server energy efficiency released a draft of the document for public comment. Draft version 9.0 was chaired by Jonahtan Koomey, data center power expert at Stanford University and LBNL and included participants from the Big Four server vendors as well as AMD and Intel. For a copy of the document, go to the EPA's Data center site.

The move toward industry-wide energy efficiency standards started when AMD and Sun hosted EPA representatives, end users and competitors at a summit in January, 2006. From there, others have gotten involved with the performance/efficiency issue.

Sun has been out front, especially from a marketing standpoint, on energy efficiency and the environment. The newest line of servers have been heavily promoted as energy efficient altneratives. Sun has hired a VP of Eco-responsibility, David Douglas. And execs have gone as far as to wrangle green design guru Bill McDonough to shill for them [Note: McDonough delined to be interviewed by SearchDataCenter.com on technology issues].

The eco-responsiblility push seems to have paid off for Sun. The company beat out Dell for the number three spot in server market share according to a report from IDC today. While a lot of Sun's gains can be attributed to a refresh of its important UltraSparc product line and a foray into x86 computing, the main message coming out of Santa Clara is green = $$$$ for data centers, and that seems to be ringing true for Sun as well.