IBM is continuing to focus on green computing. At this month’s Power and Cooling for Data Centres Summit 2007 conference in London, John Easton, senior consulting IT specialist and technical staff member, IBM systems & technology group infrastructure innovation, gave a presentation on energy efficiency in the data centre.

Keen readers of iNEWSWire UK will readily recognise the outstanding role the System i platform plays -- and is set to play -- in consolidation of servers, let alone its credentials in the POWER6 cool running debate. Big Blue touts POWER6 as the fastest microprocessors ever built. At 4.7GHz, the dual-core POWER6 processor doubles the speed of the previous generation POWER5 while only using around the same amount of electricity to run and cool it. This means customers can use the processor to increase performance by 100% or cut power consumption virtually in half. Soon, System i will feature POWER6.

Also, the IBM BladeCenter uses “calibrated vectored cooling”, which manages air intake, fan placement and zone cooling technologies to maximise the airflow inside the blade server for optimal cooling efficiency. The system also utilises energy-efficient power supplies delivering as much as 90% power supply efficiency savings.

“The EU is committed to reduce carbon emissions by 20% of 1990 levels by year 2020 and the UK Government target is 60% reduction by 2050,” says Thom Brouillard, chief technical officer, Datacentience. “Europe is more amenable than the US to external regulation. Europe is less confident that an energy-efficient data centre can be achieved. Europe is less willing to sacrifice resilience to energy efficiency. Europe tends to be less confident in metrics as well as predicting what will happen in their data centres.”

Brouillard offers some solutions: demand-side power management, server virtualisation, renewables, corporate policy, and measurement. “You cannot have high availability and energy efficiency using traditional designs,” he adds.

Raising the bar for the next seven years, IBM’s Easton said that Big Blue would further extend its early accomplishments by reducing CO2 emissions associated with its energy use 12% from 2005 to 2012 via energy conservation, use of renewable energy, and/or funding CO2 emissions reductions with renewable energy certificates or comparable instruments.

Between 1990 and 2005, IBM’s global energy conservation actions reduced or avoided CO2 emissions by an amount equal to 40% of its 1990 emissions. In 1998, IBM became the first semi-conductor company to set a numerical target for PFC emissions reduction.

Now some sobering stats. Between 2000 and 2010 sever installations will grow six-fold and storage by 69x -- IDC, 2007. Per square foot, annual data centre energy costs are 10 to 30 times more than those of a typical office building -- William Tschudi, March 2006. Data centres have doubled their energy use in the past five years -- Koomey, February 2007. Energy costs for servers will match acquisition costs by 2012 -- IDC 2007. 87% of data centres were built before 2001.

What has IBM up its sleeve? Easton pointed to project Big Green. Here, IBM is to reallocate $1 billion each year to accelerate green technologies and services; to offer a roadmap for clients to address the IT energy crisis while making use of IBM hardware, software, services, research, and financing teams; and to create a global green team of almost 1,000 energy-efficiency specialists from across IBM.

Easton said that within IBM itself energy conservation efforts from 1990-2005 have resulted in a 40% reduction in CO2 emissions and a quarter billion dollars of energy savings. It has annually invested $100m in infrastructure to support remanufacturing and recycling best practices. And Big Blue will double compute capacity by 2010 without increasing power consumption or carbon footprint, saving five billion kilowatt hours per year, equalling the energy consumed by Paris.

What these green solutions can mean for clients, said Easton, is that for the typical 25,000 square foot data centre spending $2.6m in power annually, energy costs can be cut in half, which equals the reduction of emissions from taking 850 cars off of the road.

Easton offered three pointers to what users can do to become energy efficient. “Adopt best practices in power and cooling to deliver financial benefits and reduce the squeeze on your IT budget. Reduce operational costs from energy use in your physical infrastructure, and establish your energy efficiency metric compared to peers in your industry and for year-to-year improvement benchmarks in your own operations,” he said.

“Take advantage of innovative technologies in power and cooling to improve operations. That involves more computing performance per kilowatt, shifting energy to cool/energy to operate ratio and extending the life of IT equipment.

“Consider ways to reduce environmental impact. Make meaningful energy conservation, get an improved public image and make a positive contribution to the green movement, which creates a good place to work.”

Frank Booty