Sun plans for Energy Efficient Servers

With energy efficiency and environmental issues of growing concern, Sun is preparing to tune its servers to be more environmentally friendly by introducing power management capabilities.

Sun plans to introduce the notion of power-managed states, in which future servers will respond to a user's internal energy policies. For example, a 1 kilowatt server might be tuned to run at only 500 watts, and the server figures out how to run under that constraint, Bapat said.

Power management also will be offered for memory components, chips, disk drives, and fans via intelligent firmware that will calibrate power. There will be states like idle and sleep states.

Other suggestions include running datacenters at off-peak hours for activities such as batch jobs and even siphoning off the cheaper nighttime megawatts during the night to freeze water. During the day, air conditioning use is cut by running the hot air off the ice.