the recent development of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has contributed to an explosive growth of high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information assets. Consequently, the concept of Big Data has emerged as a widely recognized trend. In order to accommodate these data-intensive services, a sustainable and resilient network infrastructure is essentially needed, as well as some mission-critical transactions are to be assured in the big data environments. However, there is an inherent contradiction involved in simultaneously accommodating both service resilience by over-provision of network resources as well as sustainable transmission by switching off the unnecessary network elements to minimize the overall energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a sustainable transmission network design (SustainMe) approach to enable the routing algorithms seeking the trade-off solutions between service resiliency and energy efficiency. The simulation results have confirmed that SustainMe approach is feasible and its derived routing algorithm for shared backup protection, i.e., SustainMe_SBP is a promising mechanism to resolve above trade-off problem. It consumes much less capacity by only sacrificing a small increase on energy expenditure comparing with other approaches.