IT guinea pigs sought to test PC replacements
This is an experiment to prove that Sun’s technology is the most environmentally friendly.
The tests will involve firms running 50 to 100 computers, with Sun willing to foot the bill for the technology overhaul.
The fund is supporting the project because it believes Sun can help SA to meet a national target of slashing electricity consumption 15% in the short term.
Information technology ate up to 4% of global energy supplies, and firms in SA were not doing enough to cut IT power bills, operations manager Barry Bredenkamp said. More than half the electricity bill at Eskom’s Megawatt Park went on IT equipment. “We have had serious load shedding over the last three weeks and Eskom says it’s going to continue getting worse for the next five years.”
Electricity demand, growing at 3% 5% a year, had to be curbed by measures that would cut usage without compromising service. The fund would endorse and recommend Sun’s equipment if the trials proved it could dramatically reduce energy consumption, he said.
Trial companies should be picked this month so the project could start early next year. First, their technology infrastructure running costs would be monitored for a month. Then the servers and PCs would be ripped out and replaced by Sun servers and dumb desktop devices, which draw all software applications and data from a server over the corporate network. That makes them far cheaper to buy than computers, makes maintenance easier, and eliminates the electricity used by PCs that need fans to cool them, said Vito Bonafede, Sun’s regional director for sub-Saharan Africa.
As Sun’s servers are designed to be smaller and more energy-efficient than rival brands, air conditioning needed to cool a data centre could be cut up to 65%, case studies have shown.
After the switch the fund would monitor running costs for another month. Sun’s goal was for the fund to confirm firms could gain significant energy savings by switching technologies, without altering software and services, Bonafede. said. “Sun is putting its money where its mouth is in trying to save the planet.”
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