Macquarie Hosting, a division of Macquarie Telecom has selected Sun Microsystems as its preferred data centre supplier for servers following a complete procurement review based predominantly on 'green' criteria. As part of Macquarie Telecom's commitment to 'greening' its DSD and ISO 27001 certified datacentre, the Intellicentre, the organisation 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 centre energy consumption by more than 650,000 KW per year.

This equates to over 600 tonnes of CO2 emissions, according to Energy Australia. The review follows six months of energy consumption monitoring across the data centre with the greatest sources of power consumption revealed to be servers, switches, firewalls and air conditioning units which contributed over 85 per cent of the total cost of operation.

Macquarie Hosting managing director, Aidan Tudehope, said there is a lot of vendor hype around green IT in the market. "In our experience it's really important to measure the technologies that actually deliver in a range of environments," he said.

"On the basis of our study findings, with an absolute focus on reducing our carbon footprint, we're now moving to Sun."

Following a 'like for like' comparison of servers from a broad range of vendors including Dell and Hewlett Packard, Tudehope said Sun Microsystems was selected.

He said 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 per cent more energy efficient than other vendor technology. In the past six months, Macquarie Hosting has seen demand for enterprise virtualisation rise from 20 per cent to 50 per cent 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," Tudehope said. "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. 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. However, not everyone agrees with Macquarie's assessment with Dell at the forefront of vendor initiatives for Green IT and HP leading its own recycling program.