Datacenter Cost Carbon Credits: See how datacenter infrastructure costs break down with rising electricity costs and increased server requirements.

---

Like many organizations, Concentric is confronted by a dilemma in its datacenter. Customers of its hosted applications and email services demand greater performance. But costs for power and cooling would skyrocket if Concentric, a 14-year-old business unit of XO Communications, simply added more servers to answer the demands of its business.

Concentric's innovative solution is giving it the best of both worlds. Sun recently spoke with Barbara Branaman, Concentric president and general manager, about how Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 CoolThreads servers are instrumental in enabling it to realize massive throughput, while reducing power, cooling, and space requirements.

Q: At most enterprises, ballooning datacenter infrastructure is the source of skyrocketing energy consumption. Is that true at Concentric?

Branaman: You can add energy price increases to the list of inevitabilities that also include death and taxes. For the last two years, our colocation customers who control their own equipment and power consumption have increased our power bills by up to 25 percent annually. We, in turn, then pass some of these increased bills back to these customers, which is fairly standard in the colocation industry.

Q: How do these costs break down? How much of the increases are due to the rising cost of electricity and how much stems from server power requirements?

Branaman: I wish I could say that most power cost increases come from inflationary energy markets, but the reality for the last couple of years is that up to 80 percent of this equation derives from increased server density. Companies require ever more processing power. For instance, our colocation customers gain more performance from their existing racks because of increased server density.