ACADEMIA

Sun Microsystems today announced that NewEnergy Associates, a Siemens Company and provider of end-to-end energy IT and consulting solutions for energy traders, utility companies and power producers, has selected Sun's dual-core Sun Fire X4200 servers to replace 23 existing Intel processor-based servers. NewEnergy is standardizing on the newest Sun Fire x64 servers powered with the AMD Opteron 200 Series processors, running on the Solaris Operating System (OS) in order to help reduce energy and maintenance IT costs, improve customer response time and reduce the amount of space occupied by servers in its data center, while increasing compute power needed to run mission-critical 64-bit applications on its compute grid. Customers Can Reduce Power and Heat Output by up to 84 Percent With Sun Fire x64 servers, NewEnergy plans to reduce its energy and cooling costs while concurrently increasing compute power, which take up about one-quarter the space than competing servers. NewEnergy chose the four-way Sun systems not only because of outstanding CPU performance, support for multiple operating systems and memory speed, but also for its built-in energy efficiency, which has proven to reduce power usage and heat output by up to 84 percent. Prior to purchasing the Sun Fire X4200 servers, NewEnergy evaluated them against similar competitive offerings. "Sun's new dual-core Sun Fire x64 servers have given us more compute power than our older systems for a much lower price than competitive offerings and have exceeded expectations in their ability to handle the large memory-intensive simulations we run daily," said Neal Tisdale, vice president of software development, NewEnergy Associates. "Power consumption and cooling costs were a big factor for us, and according to the projections we've run, replacing up to eight Intel processor-based servers with one Sun Fire X4200 server can save us between 60-79 percent in power watts of energy usage and can reduce heat output by 70-84 percent. The energy and cooling savings can enable us to install additional Sun Fire X4200 servers." Server Consolidation - When Two Perform Better Than 22, and Eight Replaces One NewEnergy is replacing its entire Houston data center, comprised of 22 Intel processor-based servers, with two Sun Fire X4200 servers powered with the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor, and running the Solaris 10 OS. NewEnergy's Houston data center performs CPU-intensive Grid computing simulations for its customers nationwide, which mirror real-world electric Grids in order to plan for potential disasters. Trial results demonstrated the Sun Fire X4200 servers as being much faster than other servers which is partially credited to the Solaris 10 OS's efficiency over memory-intensive applications running the Windows OS. "Sun offers the most advanced x64 systems on the market, which outperform competing servers by about one-and-a-half times and maximize new efficiencies to reduce expenditure in IT maintenance and energy and cooling costs," said Graham Lovell, senior director, x64 servers, Network Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Paired with blazing-fast Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors and the virtually unrivaled Solaris 10 OS, NewEnergy will be able to process its high-computational grid calculations faster than ever before, helping to ensure it can deliver real-time data on energy positions to its customers." NewEnergy's Atlanta data center has also begun a pilot test and has ongoing plans to consolidate up to eight physical single-CPU Intel processor-based servers with one four-way Sun Fire X4200 server. The Atlanta data center currently houses 60 back-office servers that run high-memory calculations for energy trading desks. A recent test demonstrated a 30 percent improvement in raw simulation times and one to eight times savings in physical space. Additionally, the initial pilot tests have shown that replacing close to eight legacy Intel processor-based servers with a single Sun Fire x64 system can save NewEnergy roughly 56-77 percent of the Volt-Amps required to power its Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) in case of a power outage. The server consolidation can also improve NewEnergy's disaster rollover contingency process, allowing virtual Sun servers to roll over to the company's other data center if necessary. "Sun Fire x64 servers have become our standard hardware for performance client accounts," added Tisdale. "Their designs are enterprise-ready and the servers proved to be extremely easy to install, which saves our busy IT staff valuable time and effort required to deploy a new server." More information on NewEnergy Associates can be found at its Web site . For more information about Sun Fire X4200 servers, please visit its Web site.