NEW YORK - IBM announced that it is redirecting $1 billion per year across its businesses in an effort to dramatically increase the level of energy efficiency of data centers. IBM's "Project Big Green" targets corporate data centers and includes a global "green team" of more than 850 architects of energy efficiency from across the company. According to IBM, an average 25,000-square-foot data center should be able to achieve a 42 percent energy savings. IBM currently runs data centers on six continents that encompass more than 8 million square feet of floor space. Within the next three years, IBM expects to double the computing capacity of its data centers without increasing their power consumption.

IBM also presented an example of what it can achieve in a company's data centers. The company is working with the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) to consolidate nearly 300 Unix servers onto 6 IBM servers, cutting energy use by 80 percent while boosting the utilization of the servers by a factor of eight. PG&E will install water cooling systems on the servers to reduce the need for air conditioning in the data centers. IBM is offering financing to help data center owners make such a transition and is also offering to help dispose of old servers.

Publication date: 05/21/2007