December 4, 2007 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Web Web host Macquarie Hosting (http://www.macquarietelecom.com/hosting) has chosen Sun Microsystems as its preferred Data Center Supplier, it was announced yesterday. The company’s move was based on a procurement review considered “predominantly on ‘green’ criteria”. According to the company, the change will result in up to 60% less energy usage.
In a positive step further asserting Macquarie Telecom’s commitment to ‘greening’ its DSD and ISO 27001 certified datacenter, the Intellicentre, the organization has committed to a rolling contract (initially worth $1 million) for the installation of a further 200 Sun Fire X64 Series servers. The move is expected initially to improve efficiency of Macquarie Hosting’s data center energy consumption by more than 650,000 KW per year. This equates to over 600 tons of CO2 emissions, according to Energy Australia.
The review follows six months of energy consumption monitoring across the data center with the greatest sources of power consumption revealed to be servers, switches, firewalls and air conditioning units which contributed over 85% of the total cost of operation.
“There’s a lot of vendor hype around green IT in the market at present,” explained Managing Director, Hosting at Macquarie Telecom, Aidan Tudehope. “In our experience it’s really important to measure the technologies that actually deliver in a range of environments. On the basis of our study findings, with an absolute focus on reducing our carbon footprint, we’re now moving to Sun”.
Sun Microsystems was selected following a ‘like for like’ comparison of servers from a broad range of vendors including Dell and HP. CPU speed was the prevailing benchmark with parallel energy consumption compared across the board. In the assessment, Sun servers running both AMD and Intel processors proved to be up to 60% more energy efficient than other vendor technology.
In the past six months, Macquarie Hosting has seen demand for enterprise virtualization rise from 20% to 50% in new customer installations. As companies reliant on critical applications increasingly look to implement realtime infrastructure, Sun’s Fire X64 Series servers were a logical match in Macquarie Hosting’s procurement strategy as they are designed, built and optimised for virtualised enterprise environments.
“The move to overhaul our procurement strategy according to green criteria is part of Macquarie Hosting’s commitment to greening our supply chain and in-turn reducing our energy consumption and impact on the environment,” Tudehope added. “We are finding more and more customers are aware of the green IT agenda and are asking what Macquarie Hosting is doing about environmental issues in response. We’re committed to staying on the front foot in our approach and this initiative is just another step on the journey.”
Additional assessment criteria in Macquarie Hosting’s procurement review included price, availability of new technologies and the quality of direct customer service provided by each vendor.
Macquarie Hosting is a division of ASX-listed Macquarie Telecom, a leading Australian and Asia Pacific supplier of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions – including voice, data, mobile and hosting – for the business and government markets. Macquarie Hosting provides managed hosting, SAN/NAS storage management, accredited security and comprehensive monitoring and management for organizations with mission critical website and online transaction requirements. Its customers include Fairfax Business Media, Haymarket Media, Showbiz.com.au and WebJet.
