...the long-awaited dawn of utility computing is on the horizon and that the industry, in Barrington's words, is now "on the cusp". Key to this shift, he believes, is the concept of de-materialisation or the digitising of formerly physical assets.
"My son at 14 doesn't interact with a machine. It's simply a gateway to the internet so he can download music or use eBay, but he doesn't have a particular device in mind," says Barrington. "He hasn't got brand loyalty and he doesn't care if it runs Intel or Microsoft. So the idea is that if you use a machine as an access device, you can de-materialise it so it doesn't have to be a clunky box."
Sun claims its Sun Ray thin-client device delivers a 75 percent energy saving over the average PC, not least because of better resource utilisation. As evidence for his claims, Barrington cites the Rural Payments Agency, which deployed 4,200 of the machines last year and expects to make electricity savings of £174,000 per annum as well as reduce its carbon footprint by 260 tons each year.
Subodh Bapat, vice president and distinguished engineer at Sun's Eco Responsibility Office (ERO) — which was set up in the US in late 2006 — says this is possible because the vendor has now made energy efficiency "a fundamental design criteria" across all strata of its product line for which it owns the intellectual property.
While ERO's function is to come up with corporate eco-friendly strategies and to set company-wide targets in terms of reducing water and power usage as well as consolidating buildings, Bapat has a more specific role. He is tasked with developing and co-ordinating energy-efficiency policies relating to the supplier's entire product portfolio and, as part of this, to set and enforce targets at both an inter- and cross-departmental level. The goal here is to ensure that different parts of the organisation communicate and work together towards the same end.
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"It's a top-to-bottom stack-level approach so we can tweak knobs and dials and know how much power a network or storage component is consuming, as well as each element within that such as memory and disks," Bapat says.
To further demonstrate its green credentials, Bapat claims Sun is working on improving the environmental integrity of its supply chain and claims 95 percent of components can now be recycled, re-used or re-manufactured. Steps are also being taken to remove hazardous substances, with PVC components now being replaced with steel or aluminium ones, which, in turn, are more effective in terms of system cooling.
