Sun Microsystems has today unveiled a series of new services and whitepapers designed to help firms enhanced the energy and space efficiency of their datacentres and limit the environmental footprint of their IT estate.

The new services come as Sun also announced the opening of three new "green" datacentres, including one at Blackwater in the UK, which the company claims have been designed to slash energy use and space requirements.

"There have been a huge number of announcements from all the IT vendors about improving their environmental impact, but most of them are currently just plans to improve things," said Richard Barrington, head of public policy at Sun in the UK. "But we've now spent a year working on this and have consolidated multiple European datacentres into this one location and cut energy use by 60 percent."

He added that the hardware upgrade had also allowed Sun to reduce its space requirements by 80 percent, enhance its storage utilisation rates, and cut its cooling costs. "We can now run the datacentre at a temperature of 78 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to an industry average of 68 degrees," explained Barrington. "Every degree warmer you can run the facility saves four percent on your HVAC [Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning] bill."

Sun's energy saving initiative is also set to continue, according to Barrington, with the company committed to following the hardware upgrade with a wider roll out of virtualisation software. "These systems run mission critical apps and that is part of the reason we didn’t undertake a large virtualisation initiative and focused on getting the hardware up to date," he said. "But the next step will be more virtualization – there are more energy savings to be had. "

The company said it would now "open source" all it had learnt from the project by making a series of whitepapers freely available on its website and had also launched several new service offerings designed to help firms keen to emulate its green datacentre deployment.

Barrington said the new services included an environmental assessment service to help firms assess the energy use of their datacentres and offices; an energy efficiency service that will offer firms a range of "what if" scenarios detailing how best to limit their energy use; and an operational assessment service to analyse the environmental footprint of firms' IT operations and recommend improvements.

He insisted the new services could be applied to a wide range of different IT infrastructures and were not solely suitable for Sun shops. "If you are doing business with Sun you do it with your eyes wide open and you know we're not suggesting we're agnostic," he said. "But a lot of what we've done [with our green datacentre initiative], particularly with the use of ITIL guidelines, applies to any IT environment."