Wall Street & Technology: Blog: Inside IBMýs $1 Billion Green Data Center Initiative

Inside IBM’s $1 Billion Green Data Center Initiative

Today, IBM announced that it is redirecting $1 billion per year toward increasing energy efficiency in IT. Every so often IBM announces that it’s redirecting $1 billion toward something – for instance, in 2006 it was information management, in 2001 it was Linux – and thus pumping up existing software and services in the category and adding new ones. Today’s announcement shows that Big Blue has a strong interest in being perceived as green.

In one new effort of “Project Big Green,” IBM says it will reengineer the eight million square feet of data centers it manages to make them more efficient, transferring providing energy and cost savings to customers.

Late this summer, IBM says it will extend its Power Executive energy management software, which currently supports System X and Blade Centers, to run across all IBM system environments and to include more intelligent policy driven management. Power Executive will also work with the Tivoli monitoring tool so that data center managers can watch energy usage right alongside server utilization and performance. Both products will feed data into a forthcoming usage and accounting product that will keep track of how much energy particular business units, departments or applications are using, for management purposes or for chargebacks.

The company announced a Scalable Modular Data Center, which is a pre-configured 500 or 1,000-foot data center similar to the data-center-in-a-box offerings of Sun Microsystems and Rackable Solutions. IBM's modular unit’s power and cooling is provided by APC (now part of Schneider Electric), and is available today.

An optimized airflow assessment for cabling systems will be available late this summer.

In its labs, IBM is working on a wireless technology for measuring temperature distributions within data centers. Wireless sensors will help managers quickly find energy inefficiencies. This technology will be part of a formal energy efficiency assessment service IBM plans to offer.

In a forthcoming specialized facilities service, IBM will help customers design and build green buildings, focusing on intelligent use of natural lighting, use of fresh air, and so forth. What are IBM’s credentials here? “We’ve designed and built over 30 million square feet of data centers for clients around the world and we manage data centers ourselves; we’re the largest and most experienced builder of data centers around the world,” says Peter McCaffrey, program director, IBM Virtualization Solutions.

Also late this summer, IBM will be coming out with new “hybrid” servers that will come packaged with specialized high-performance, low wattage Cell-based processors as well as x86-based microprocessors and Power-based microprocessors. “That gives you the ability to apply the processor that can most efficiently handle each type of workload,” McCaffrey says. For instance, analytical work and large media files lend themselves to being sent over to a specialized accelerator. The Mayo Clinic uses the Cell processor in some of its IBM Blade Centers to speed up the processing of 3-D medical images used by radiologists; the Cell is said to be up to 50 times faster than a traditional processor in this setting.

Posted by Penny Crosman at 06:28 PM

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