IBM has said it would expand its global efforts to deliver greater energy efficiency to businesses facing skyrocketing energy costs, environmental concerns and corporate sustainability requirements. The company introduced new services, technologies and financing to help enterprises bridge the gap between the mandate for Chief Information Officers (CIOs) to build "greener" technology infrastructures that can meet growing business requirements and the desire of Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) to realize rapid financial benefits from such investments.
IBM Modular Data Centers - scaling for the long term while slashing energy costs today
The second phase of Project Big Green intends to drive greater advancements in energy efficiencies by making datacenters more flexible in matching information technology (IT) needs to capital and operating costs. The datacenter environment is going through dramatic change. According to the EPA, energy costs for these environments are doubling every five years and the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air/Conditioning Engineers expects technology densities to increase by 20 times in this decade. With roughly 60 percent of the capital costs and 50 percent of the operational costs of running a datacenter being energy related, the ability to design, construct and activate a highly energy efficient data center has become a business imperative.
To meet that imperative for both the CIO and CFO, IBM is introducing modular, energy-efficient datacenter designs available anywhere in the world. Designed to power businesses ranging from large global enterprises to small organizations in remote areas, the new modular datacenters can reduce energy consumption by as much as 50 percent. They include:
Enterprise Modular Data Center (EMDC) - an enterprise class datacenter "shrink-wrapped" and standardized from 5,000 square feet up to 20,000 square feet. This approach enables clients to bring new datacenters online three-to-six months sooner than a custom designed version. By building in smaller, standardized modules, clients can scale the starting datacenter capacity by up to 12 times while matching their capital and operational costs to their IT needs over time. This approach allows the customers to defer up to 40 percent of the capital expense and 50 percent of the operational expense until the capacity is required. Each EMDC is designed to achieve the world's highest ratings for energy leadership, as determined by the Green Grid, an industry group focused on advancing energy efficiency for datacenters and business compute ecosystems.
Portable Modular Data Center (PMDC) - provides a fully functional datacenter in a pod-like form with a complete physical infrastructure including power and cooling systems and remote monitoring. It also has all the elements of the secure operating environments found in traditional "raised- floor" datacenters, including protection from fire, smoke, humidity, condensation and temperature changes. The PMDC can be shipped and deployed into any environment and can support multiple technology vendors and multiple systems in an industry standard rack environment.
High Density Zone (HDZ) - a modular system that provides incremental cooling and power capability in existing datacenters that are tapped out of capacity. The HDZ system can be swapped into an existing datacenter without disrupting current operations and can provide up to 35 percent cost savings compared to retrofitting an existing datacenter.
The modular datacenters introduced are essentially miniature versions of IBM's renowned datacenters, mimicking the power and energy efficiency of facilities that serve many of the world's largest enterprises. The capability to increase computing capacity while simultaneously reducing power consumption is an antidote to a pressing business need. CIOs must now plan datacenter support of global enterprises as energy costs rise to all-time highs. IBM's Project Big Green helps them design and deploy energy efficient modular datacenters while providing CFOs the savings which can dramatically reduce energy bills.
"Since we announced IBM's Project Big Green a year ago, we've engaged with thousands of businesses, governments and educational institutions around the world to help them address critical energy challenges in their data centers," said Mike Daniels, senior vice-president and group executive, IBM Global Technology Services. "In the second phase of Big Green, we're unveiling the most advanced green technologies and services to help clients become much more efficient in how they consume and pay for energy, not only in their datacenters, but across all of their operations."
New technologies - IBM research paves way for green datacenters
IBM scientists have developed a method to cool computer chips that have circuits and components stacked on top of each other with tiny rivers of water, an advance that promises to significantly reduce energy consumed by datacenters. Earlier this month, IBM researchers, in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, demonstrated a prototype that integrates the cooling system into the three dimensional (3-D) chips by piping water directly between each layer in the stack. These so-called 3-D chip stacks -- which take chips and memory devices that traditionally sit side-by-side on a silicon wafer and stacks them together on top of one another -- presents one of the most promising approaches to enhancing chip performance beyond its predicted limits, while simultaneously reducing the energy consumed by datacenters.
IBM storage systems researchers are also studying ways to measure power utilization on the IT workload to help customers with data center planning. Ultimately, the scientists expect to integrate these new technologies into storage management tools for real-time power consumption management.
In addition, IBM service researchers are now applying Component Business Modeling (CBM) to the environmental space, particularly with regard to reducing carbon footprint. CBM allows organizations to identify opportunities for improvement and innovation by regrouping their activities into a manageable number of modular business components. This enables flexibility and provides for a clarified focus on the core capabilities needed to run the business and drive business strategy. Organizations interested in carbon management use CBM to identify areas of the business with high carbon impact levels and opportunity for change. For example, in a CBM map there is an "IT Systems and Operations" component with high potential to reduce carbon footprint through IBM's green datacenter approach. CBM maps are also pre-populated with performance metrics and industry benchmarks that can be easily used to analyze business processes where waste can be reduced.
New products and services for the green datacenter
IBM has also announced new software for its industry leading storage virtualization system, the IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) 4.3. The new SVC 4.3 software can significantly improve the flexibility and responsiveness of IT infrastructures by creating consolidated, virtual pools of information across the enterprise, enabling IT departments to centrally manage resources and respond more quickly to client needs. Storage virtualization technology can also reduce requirements for additional physical storage hardware systems, which can ultimately reduce overall energy usage in the datacenter.
In addition, IBM is announcing three new energy efficient services to help clients with datacenter storage and virtualization needs. They include:
IBM Server Optimization & Integration Services for VMware server virtualization - a comprehensive set of services that can help clients increase the flexibility of their server infrastructure, achieve utilization rates up to 60 percent, and significantly reduce the number of servers they manage. The service can help reduce energy costs by up to 30 percent and reduce total cost of ownership by up to 50 percent.
IBM Storage Optimization and Integration Services for process excellence - a service that addresses challenges in the enterprise including skill transfer, change management, lack of uniformity and the impact of resource churn. This service builds on the storage infrastructure power consumption and carbon footprint reporting capability which is part of the new IBM Novus Storage Enterprise Resource Planner (SERP) v4.3.1 release.
IBM Softek z/OS Dataset Mobility Facility (zDMF) --a service that enables clients to move data at the dataset level with minimal disruption to application availability. This automated approach provides businesses greater flexibility, faster adoption of better-performing, larger capacity disk volumes, and newer, more energy-efficient storage systems.
Financing to go green
IBM Global Financing also announced a customized, all inclusive financial package for energy efficient IT services, infrastructure and business transformation projects. Such financing helps preserve client cash flow for the entire scope of a client's green datacenter project, including hardware, software, services and maintenance with a single, comprehensive package. By financing green datacenter projects, IBM Global Financing can administer all the clients' current and future IT investments, even paying off current financing contracts with other providers.