Sun Tools Let VARs Cut Data Center Power Costs
It is an issue which solution providers can easily find common ground, said Dermot Duggan, director of eco innovation solution for Sun and the man responsible for building the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company's internal ecology-friendly IT infrastructure.
"Every customer has power, space, and cooling issues," Duggan said. "It's nice to have an issue where customers push you to talk about it."
It certainly is, said Vince Conroy, CTO of FusionStorm, a San Francisco-based Sun solution provider which has been helping customers with data center consolidation and energy conservation issues for the past six months.
"One thing we have been hearing from our customers is, 'it's great you can talk to us about our networking and our virtualization,'" Conroy said. "'But we want to be looking at a holistic data center solution.'"
CIOs and IT directors are looking at the costs of running their data centers in the face of growing power requirements and the growing cost of energy, Duggan said. They are also looking at things like their IT infrastructure's carbon footprint as part of the need to show the public that they are concerned about the environment, he said. "Eco... -- it's as much about economics as it is environment," he said.
Bill Cate, senior director of global channel planning and programs, said that Sun is packing its own data center cost savings experience and intellectual property into a new program called Sun Eco Partner Advantage.
"The program enables customers to build a practice they can use to talk to customers about cutting energy use while getting better margins," Cate said.
There are four components to the Sun Eco Partner Advantage.
The first is education and training. It may be obvious, Cate said, but it shows Sun and its partners are putting in the resources needed to understand the data center power situation and how to use technologies such as virtualization to help cut energy usage.
The second is assessment of data center power efficiency, including such items as air temperature, airflow, and raised floor vs. flat floor issues, Cate said. To do this, Sun is developing the capability to report on every make and model of server and storage device in the data center. The vendor already has its own products in the data base, and is still adding information on other vendors' products. Sun will also add information from competitors based on solution provider requests, he said.
The third is tools to profile servers and applications in order to help partners provide proposals based on the assessment.
The fourth is implementation of the proposal, Cate said.
Among the tools Sun is providing its partners is the TCO Analyst Product, a sizing tool that measures the TCO of a server based on such details as memory and disk configuration; the AC/DC tool for profiling which applications are running on which servers, and the Sun Value Platform business case tool for detailing the metrics and carbon footprint of a data center, based on data from the other two tools, Duggan said. Sun also provides a set of calculators to let customers and solution providers quickly calculate power consumption, he said.
These are not just tools thrown out to make clients feel good, Duggan said. "These tools are supported by Sun," he said. "Sun has development plans for the tools, and responds to questions or requests for additional functions from our partners."
Sun is looking to work with partners who either have a consulting practice or who have experience in data center consolidation and virtualization, Duggan said. "But leveraging this program, they can take themselves from somebody trying to build this practice to someone who can offer this kind of practice," he said.
Sun is already rolling the program out to its solution providers, Cate said. The company is initially targeting between 400 partners and 500 partners, but it is not limiting itself. "It's not exclusive," he said. "If all partners want to be a part of this, they can."
Sun does not charge any up-front costs for the training partners need to offer this service. However, Cate said he expects a solution provider will incur about $40,000 in terms of internal time and resources needed to get one person trained and certified. "But we feel that the return-on-investment comes in only one or two deals," he said.
Sun is partnering with Worldwide Environmental Service, a Philadelphia-based provider of data center configuration services, on some of the intellectual property used by solution providers, Cate said.
FusionStorm is still evaluating the Sun Eco Partner Advantage program internally both in terms of how well it works and whether it is suitable for particular customers, Conroy said.
"Part of Sun's strategy is, these are best practices and methodologies that have been used internally," he said. "They have decided to share the family jewels."
There are many ways to demonstrate immediate cost savings in a data center, with cutting down on power consumption just one of them, Conroy said. "Sun's program makes sense, not just in terms of environmental friendliness, but also from including a business perspective."
For Advanced Systems Group, a Denver-based Sun solution provider which is involved in helping a lot of customers in "co-lo relo," or co-location relocation, the tools are a welcome gift from sun, said CTO Mark Teter.
Just having a good data base of product information will in itself be a big help, Teter said.
"We've done a lot of power sizing," he said. "The fact is, the power load rating on most manufacturers' equipment is wrong. Some don't draw as much as they're rated, others draw more than they're rated. We need the correct information to size the USPs and cooling. That's why having the database and the ability to optimize power and cooling with a company's ROI (return on investment) is a very powerful and needed service."