IBM’s Green Innovation Data Center

IBM has been keeping busy in introducing green initiatives in the recent past. They had introduced the Strategic Carbon Management program to help reduce up to 50 per cent of CO2 emissions. The company has also been working on its Green Innovation Data Center, a project that was taken up to build a showcase for energy-efficiency computing. The center brought in four data centers crammed to one in order to save costs and be more efficient. It has the latest in energy-efficient tech gear, including a network of 200 sensors and water-cooled servers. The need for an eco-friendly data center by many electronic giants was mainly due to an estimation made by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2007 that showed that data centers alone use about 1.5 percent of all electricity in the U.S. and are on a pace to double consumption in the coming years. IBM wasn’t far below in this list and felt the need to make changes for both the company as well as its customers.

Main highlights of IBM’s changes include consolidating their computing workload with virtualization and upgraded to more energy-efficient hardware. For this to work efficiently and avoiding extreme heat, IBM is using a number of techniques to cool efficiently. They are also using sensors near the server and storage racks to monitor the temperature. Operators can get a thermal map of the data center based on the sensor data to help find trouble spots. The center was designed for tours so customers can get some ideas on how to lighten their own data centers’ energy load. The company has also said that the investments of this project were also “very cost justified”.
[Cnet]