Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson (NYSE: EMR) and a global leader in enabling Business-Critical Continuity, and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced a global sales alliance that will help provide businesses and organizations with roadmaps and technologies to increase the productivity and energy efficiency of their datacenters. Globally, datacenter energy consumption is driven by businesses' demand for greater computing capacity and increased IT centralization. When combined with increasing global electricity prices, the financial implications are significant.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, it is estimated that U.S. corporations and public agencies spent $4.5 billion in 2006 to power their datacenters, and national datacenter energy consumption could nearly double in the next five years to more than $7.4 billion annually, making datacenter efficiency a leading priority for customers. The power and cooling infrastructure that supports IT equipment in datacenters can account for more than 50 percent of total data center energy consumption.

To address the need for energy-efficiency improvements, Sun's datacenter efficiency consultants will work directly with Emerson's local Liebert power, cooling and services specialists throughout the world to assess, develop and maintain solutions to a variety of customer datacenter problems. The companies will deliver not only the plans but also the products and services for improved data center productivity and efficiency.

Dr. Robert W. Leland, director, Computing and Network Services Center at Sandia National Laboratories, an organization served by the joint Sun-Emerson Network Power alliance, explains, "Right away, we recognized the great value of our association with Sun and Emerson Network Power, and we believe that our collaboration on a new and highly advanced HPC (High-Performance Computing) solution will provide leading-edge performance to our customers with substantially less environmental impact and much lower lifetime cost than the other options we had considered."

The Sun Professional Services and Emerson Network Power alliance led to a jointly designed, energy-efficient solution for Sandia National Laboratories. Specifically, the bundled solution includes Sun Cooling Door systems, Sun Blade X6275 server modules and Emerson's Liebert XD precision cooling technology, which removes heat at the source, requires minimal datacenter footprint and helps avoid costly datacenter makeovers.

Amy O'Connor, vice president of marketing, Sun Services, said, "Datacenter efficiency is a leading priority for our customers and our alliance with Emerson will help enable us to collaboratively assess a customer's current IT operations and identify opportunities to increase productivity and improve efficiency of the datacenter. Together, we'll help customers minimize capital investments that can be used to fund changes based on the savings from operational costs—an appealing approach in today's economy."