In making a purported billion-dollar-a-year commitment to “green” technology, IBM is demonstrating more than mere marketing savvy: Big Blue is driving home the point that out-of-control energy consumption is becoming more and more of a profit drain on enterprises and an increasingly lucrative opportunity for vendors.
In making a purported billion-dollar-a-year commitment to “green” technology, IBM is demonstrating more than mere marketing savvy: Big Blue is driving home the point that out-of-control energy consumption is becoming more and more of a profit drain on enterprises and an increasingly lucrative opportunity for vendors.
In short, green sells these days … and virtually every major IT vendor is looking to cash in.
At a press conference in New York on Thursday, IBM debuted what it is calling, naturally enough, Project Big Green, an initiative that will see 850 Global Technology Services employees redesign IBM’s own data centers, as well as those of its customers. The mission: dramatically reduce energy consumption.
“Large companies are facing a large crisis around energy,” says Mike Daniels, senior vice president of IBM Global Technology Services. “This issue is surfacing in a number of different ways whether it’s the capital required to build new data centers because people are out of capacity or where people are out of power or trying to manage that power. We think this is an issue where we can provide leadership for the industry and for our clients.”
The $1 billion IBM is promising to spend in going green will be funneled into a number of different efforts, says Pete McCaffrey, director of virtualization at IBM.
“Some of the investment will be around redesigning our data centers, but there is also investment in research and development and also in our hardware and software products,” he says. “The new services that have been developed are ready to go on the market, so that particular investment is behind us.”
IBM’s green initiative is not entirely self-serving, analysts say.
“It’s more than that,” says Dan Olds, senior analyst with Gabriel Consulting. “It’s more a gathering of IBM hardware, software, services and outsourcing into a single green cause. IBM has been pursuing virtualization for a couple of decades. It reminds me of IBM’s Linux initiative where they went at it with everything and all systems.”
Almost every company in the technology space has some sort of green initiative. The Green Grid, comprised of HP, AMD, IBM, Sun and the Environmental Protection Agency, is collecting best practices in data center operation, construction and design, and issuing recommendations for energy-efficient IT.
Even Google is proposing a new 12-volt standard for power supplies to eliminate multivoltage power supply units that waste 30% to 45% of their energy.
“Every IT vendor from cable guys on up has some sort of green initiative,” says Olds. “Because IBM is the biggest IT vendor in the world, they are going out a bit bigger than everyone else.”
IBM claims that the savings for customers are great in going green — by using IBM technologies such as blade servers instead of other vendor’s technologies, a customer with a 25,000-square-foot data center should be able to save as much as 42% on energy consumption.
IDC estimates that for every dollar spent on computer hardware, another 50 cents is spent on energy. This is expected to increase to more than 71 cents by 2011.
Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is one customer that says it has already benefited from IBM’s green initiative. The company used IBM diagnostic technology at three data centers to measure and identify hot spots, air leakage and other inefficiencies across 40,000 square feet of data center space. Had PG&E surveyed this space manually, it would have taken several weeks instead of a few days.
“”The real key to us is on energy efficiency and reducing the demand for energy both for us and our customers,” says Brad Whitcomb, vice president of customer products and services for PG&E.
Further, by using IBM virtualization technology to consolidate 300 Unix servers onto six IBM System p servers, PG&E expects to reduce energy consumption by 80%. PG&E will also deploy IBM Rear Door Heat eXchanger water-cooling technology on the System p servers to reduce heat in the data center by as much as 60%.
IBM will also benefit from the use of its technologies in going green. The company is redesigning more than 8 million square feet of data centers worldwide. It expects to reduce energy use by five billion kilowatt hours per year, while doubling the computing capacity of its data centers.
IBM isn’t letting on what these services will cost, but they will consist of five components: diagnosis, building, virtualization, provisioning and cooling. It will start with a diagnosis of existing facilities and include an energy assessment, a three-dimensional power analysis and thermal analytics. A diagnostic component called the IBM Data Center Energy Efficiency Assessment rates the energy efficiency of the data center and presents a plan for customers that will increase their efficiency.
Another diagnostic technology called Mobile Measurement Technology measures the temperature distributions in data centers and gathers thermal data on hot spots, air leakage and other inefficiencies. Further IBM will provide a Thermal Analysis for High Density Computing service that identifies and resolves heat-related issues and provides options for power savings.
Diagnosis will then turn to a building phase, which helps customers plan, build or update energy-efficient data centers. IBM will provide an Energy Efficiency Self Assessment that gives customers a view of their data center energy efficiency. The company will also offer Scalable Modular Data Centers, preconfigured 500 or 1,000 feet in size, that can be implemented in eight to 12 weeks. They will also provide cabling recommendations for improving air flow beneath data center floors and reducing cabling expenditures.
The next step in the initiative is the virtualization of customers’ server and storage infrastructure and the deployment of energy-saving special-purpose processors such as the Cell processor. Using the company’s BladeCenter servers with embedded Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches, for example, can save customers 50% of the power per port over a typical rack-mounted server.
Customers will then be encouraged to use power and provisioning software to reduce server and storage energy consumption and to cool the data center inside and out with liquid cooling technologies. The company unveiled a stored cooling product called the IBM Data Center Stored Cooling Solution and recommended use of its Rear Door Heat eXchanger for its servers. The company also plans to introduce a new set of liquid cooling technologies later this year.
