IBM’s Project Big Green

IBM has announced their new “PROJECT BIG GREEN“. IBM will be redirecting $1 billion per year across its businesses, mobilising the company’s resources to dramatically increase the level of energy efficiency in IT.

This was established after IBM observed that businesses are beginning to face real challenges with regard to energy consumption and costs. A Google researcher predicts hardware costs could soon be overtaken by the cost of power. Analyst firms agree and have speculated that 2010 will be the year when the cost of power could overtake the price of hardware.

Gartner Research have added to the discussion by predicting that energy costs alone could soon represent more than half the cost of running a data centre – if servers continue to consume electricity at their current rate.

The IBM initiative includes a new global “green team” of more than 850 energy efficiency architects from across IBM. This team is making refinements in lower CPU power consumption, new multi-core processors and advanced power management technologies that can boost the containment of energy consumption and cost.

But the most dramatic effect that can be realised is reduction in your overall number of servers. Power consumption savings can be even greater when storage consolidation is also taken into account (storage resources are among the biggest consumers of energy in a data centre).

Among the potential benefits of resource virtualisation are higher rates of resource utilisation for servers, storage, and networks. As a result, fewer physical resources may need to be turned on. Furthermore, that potential reduction in power consumption may occur without any additional capital expenses.

IBM System p and System i servers present a dramatic picture of the potential to utilise resources more efficiently and increase energy efficiency. What is compelling about these servers is the ability to create multiple logical servers supporting processor allocations as fine as a tenth of a CPU via IBM POWER5 microprocessors.

Similar savings can be gained with the IBM BladeCenter, which provides a central chassis for sharing power among a number of server blades. Whether AMD, Intel, or Power CPU modules are used, blades can provide a savings of up to between 19% and 24% when compared to rack-mounted servers. The BladeCenter can be especially advantageous when used to centralise desktop computing with virtual PCs using a virtual client solution.

Talk to us here at Computer Merchants if you want more information about making power consumption savings in your data centre. We can help you reduce costs and have a positive impact on the environment at the same time.