Green Data Centres With IBM’s Project Big Green

Here’s an extract from IBM’s website giving some insight to IBM’s green direction:

Energy supply, consumption, and environmental impact are now part of the IT decision process

As energy costs rise and concerns for the environment make the front page, IT managers have a new responsibility in addressing energy efficiency concerns in the IT infrastructure. Executives have always been focused on business growth. But what if your data centre can’t support expansion due to power and cooling limitations or spiraling energy costs?

Solving that problem falls to the IT manager and adding more servers is not the answer

There are numerous challenges involved such as:

• your utility may not have power available;
• your CFO may tell you that energy costs are too high or
• you may not have the necessary cooling capacity in your data centre.

A new focus on IT energy efficiency - building the “green” data centre

Data centre power and cooling requirements top the list of today’s green IT initiatives

Keeping the IT infrastructure adequately cooled and operating efficiently is paramount to a green IT strategy. Careful planning and thoughtful implementation is one way to ensure data centre success.

Another is the selection of the right hardware - so strongly consider storage and servers designed around power efficiency technologies and capabilities.

Explore the IBM solutions to this IT challenge

IBM has been leading the challenge for a green environment

In August 2007 they moved the workload from 3,900 of its own servers to 30 virtualised System z9 mainframes running Linux. They anticipated saving more than US $2 million in energy costs by reducing power consumption by 80%. Now that’s putting your money
where your mouth is!

And to demonstrate out of the box thinking, in Switzerland IBM were part of a solution that used waste heat from a large data centre to heat a local public swimming pool. Talk about a great community service - a service that is not quite so necessary in our home town of Brisbane, but for our southern friends it could be worth considering!

See the IBM Project Big Green Press Room for the lastest green data centre initiatives.