Project Big Green has been announced in India by IBM. This initiative has been launched as part of the global Intelligent Energy campaign, aimed at helping economies cope with the existing and impending energy crisis.
The initiative includes new products and services for IBM and its clients to sharply reduce data center energy consumption, transforming the world s business and public technology infrastructures into green data centers.
IBM s efforts under the Intelligent Energy campaign will be channeled through four specific initiatives namely Client Innovations in Energy, Application of Technology & Services for Energy Efficiency, Activities with Energy Influencers, and Environmental Efforts at Big Blue. With its work under each of these pillars, IBM aims to create a holistic approach to addressing the energy issue facing the globe.
As part of this initiative IBM will create a global green team of over 1000 energy efficiency specialists from across the company, to offer green solutions comprising IBM s hardware, software, services, research, and finance offerings.
IBM is using its expertise and energy-smart technology innovations to outline a five-step approach namely diagnose, build, virtualize, manage and cool that is designed to dramatically improve energy efficiency for clients.
The existing facilities are evaluated according to energy assessment, virtual 3-D power management and thermal analytics. After the evaluation efficient data centre is planned, built or updated. Virtualizing IT infrastructures and special purpose processor follows this. The power management software is controlled and finally liquid cooling solutions both inside and out of the data center are exploited.
Announcing Project Big Green in India, Steven Sams, vice president , Site & Facilities Services, IBM said, "Businesses around the world are consuming extreme amounts of energy through their use of IT -over 100 billion kilowatts per year globally furthering today's energy crisis."
"According to Morgan Stanley, energy used to power and cool today s data centers represents 44 % of a data center s TCO and for a company of any size today, this can be a huge saving, besides it being a great contribution towards protecting the environment," he added.
Elaborating on the issue in India, Jyoti Satyanathan, country manager, eServer pSeries, IBM India said, "In India, the need for intelligent energy solutions is more acute than many other nations. As per IDC, IT spending in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to grow by 52 % to reach US$162.5 billion by 2010 and this growth is driven by India in addition to China. However, our country is already facing an energy crisis."
"According to the Central Electricity Authority (CEA), at the current annual generation capacity of 1,30,000 MW, we face a shortage of nearly 9% with peak load deficits being higher at 10-11% and it will only get worse. It is important that Indian organizations start taking this problem seriously, and make the appropriate investments so that their energy spends can keep pace with their growth," he added.
IBM will soon launch an open, web-enabled clearinghouse for energy efficiency incentives. The Energy Efficiency Incentive Finder will serve as a central website for details about energy efficiency incentives and programs that are available from local utility companies, governments, and other participating agencies anywhere in the world.
Also, IBM Global Financing (IGF), the financing business segment of IBM, will provide a green wrapper of financing solutions to help data center owners access or acquire the hardware, software and services they need to build an energy efficient data center.
By using these technologies internally, IBM expects to double the computing capacity of its data centers within the next three years without increasing power consumption or its carbon footprint.
