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Everyday is Earth Day

KP Unnikrishnan urges the need to build eco-responsible practices, policies, and products

With energy costs eclipsing all-time highs, and global warming tipping the planet’s ecological balance, the stakes for citizens of planet Earth have never been higher. Scientists project that by 2100 our planet will be warmer than it’s been in 50 million years. Sea levels, which are moderated by Earth’s global temperatures, are rising three times faster than the historical rate.

The need of the hour therefore is an outreach operation to raise awareness about the effects of global warming. The goal is to motivate consumers, governments, and businesses to support eco-responsible practices, policies, and products that slow or even reverse climate change. The work on eco responsibility is therefore part of the Participation Age—as a planet and as a society; we are all in this together.

The need to fuel the global power grid grows. So does the appetite for faster, better, cheaper computing infrastructure. But faster can be cooler, better can be cleaner and cheaper can be greener. It’s called eco-responsibility.

For more than a decade, Sun has been working to make every day Earth Day. The company has aggressively pursued eco-responsible policies since 1995, when its first plan to optimize energy consumption was implemented.

Sun has initiated numerous programs within the company to raise awareness and protect the environment, including recycling, conservation, telecommuting, environmentally sensitive manufacturing, and eco-friendly packaging, to name a few.

Sun’s biggest challenges and greatest successes have been discovering, developing, and marketing breakthrough technologies that substantially increase computing power, while simultaneously driving down energy requirements and costs for customers.

The market demands more and more computing power, and the computer designs tend to burn more and more energy. It now takes 80 barrels of oil to keep the average corporate data center running for one day. The industry has to change that.

Sun in collaboration with APC-MGE, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Hitachi Data Systems and Wipro Infotech recently announced a new eco alliance to address the growing issues of limited power, space, and energy, in a climate of increasing demand for performance and utilization.

While 2007 has been a year of awareness about the issues of energy consumption and going forward, 2008 will be a period of hectic activity among corporates to pursue their eco goals. If we were to look back at what happened in 2007 and make some predictions on the eco outlook for 2008, this is what they would be:

The Year in Green: Reflections on ‘07 and Predictions for ‘08

• Consumers and the media look for ‘the beef’.

This year, we went from awareness to action on the environment. The term ‘greenwashing’ became more popular too, as some companies were accused of putting hype before substance. With a public and media that are far more sophisticated and discerning about all things green, the demand for authentic action will increase, and the environment will benefit. The focus in 2008 will be about what we can actually do to reduce our impact—or better yet, what we have already done.

• Power-related glitch at a major data center.

Every day we are more and more reliant on a growing web of Internet-based social and business services. Data centers that support these services are growing at high rates, but the power grid isn’t keeping up. We have aging, overburdened circuits in financial hubs like Mumbai and Tokyo; tremendous growth rates in other parts of Asia and the world; major new Internet data centers in obscure corners of the globe; and 12 million new people are logging online per week around the world. According to the Bureau of Energy Efficiency, India will have an energy demand for 20,000 megawatts of electricity by 2015 and going by the present state where there is a deficit of 10-11% in peak load, there is a huge power problem and has to be addressed immediately. The probability is rising that 2008 will bring a high-impact power outage that will affect consumers in new, and totally unexpected ways.

The author is Director- Marketing, Alliances and Teleweb Sales, Sun Microsystems India