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IBM goes 'Big Green' in India

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: Project Big Green, an IBM service initiative is aimed at building and redesigning datacenters that consume less energy. With the launch of its second phase of the project, the team from IBM Global Technology Services (GTS) is now targeting large corporate customers in India. 

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publive-imageThe initiative for an average 25,000 square foot data centre, the potential energy savings should be upwards of 42 percent, which based on the US energy terms, would equate to a 7,439-tonne reduction in carbon emissions per year.

Addressing a group of CIOs at the “Technology Gourmet” event held here, Steven Sams, vice-president global site & facilities, IBM GTS said: “Large companies are facing a huge energy crisis. This issue is surfacing in a number of different ways and data centers are doubling ever five years. In fact, by 2030 and it is estimated that eight percent of the energy on this planet will be consumed by the data centers.”

The event was organized by CIOL, (India’s largest IT portal) in association with IBM India.

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IBM claims that the savings for customers are great in going green, by using IBM technologies such as their 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 percent on energy consumption.

Sams cited the example of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E), one of the customers that 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. 

In a recent report, Sams said that $30-$50 million will be needed to run data centers that would be amount to 75 percent of the energy costs. The Project Big Green was launched in 2007 and has outlined a five-step approach to improving energy efficiency.

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The five steps are: publive-imageDiagnose: energy assessment, virtual 3-D power management, and thermal analytics

Build: plan, build, or update to an energy-efficient data centre

Virtualize: IT infrastructures and special-purpose processors

Manage: control with power management software

Cool: exploit liquid cooling solutions inside and out of the data centre

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"This will help reduce consumption by 40-50 percent, in US terms save $1.3 million in the yearly savings, he said adding that it will also have a positive impact on the environment."

For starters, virtualization will be one of the biggest players in this project. IBM leads the way in providing the industry’s most comprehensive virtualization technologies and this investment will demonstrate their ability to leverage high density computing systems.

In addition, the project will include IBM’s Cool Blue portfolio of energy efficient power and cooling technologies. All of this, and the energy efficient design and construction of the new facility will dramatically reduce energy thus reducing pollution created from this large of a data center.

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An IDC report says that savings is huge, which estimates that for every dollar spent on computer hardware, another 50 cents is spent on energy. This amount, IDC says, is expected to increase to more than 71 cents by 2011.

The company also stated that it will soon launch The Energy Efficiency Incentive Finder, a central website for details about energy efficiency incentives and programmes that are available from local utility companies, governments, and other participating agencies anywhere in the world, Sams adds.

IBM Global Financing is positioned as part of Project Big Green to provide a green wrapper of financing solutions to help organizations acquire the hardware, software, and services they need to build an energy-efficient data centre while aligning upfront costs with anticipated project benefits.

For the Build step, IBM announced the Energy Efficiency Self Assessment as well as the IBM Scalable Modular Data Center, a pre-configured 500 or 1,000 square foot energy efficient data centre solution, among other offerings.