IBM’s green initiatives have begun paying rich dividends to its customers in the realm of data centres. Considering the spiralling cost of real estate and electricity, several companies with large data centres are looking at minimising the use of space and also electricity.
According to IDC report, for every dollar of hardware, another 50 cents are spent on electricity.
Rise in costs
There has been a manifold rise in power and cooling costs, server management and administration costs in the last 12 years.
Anoop Nambiar, country manager of IBM’s business partners’ organisation (India & South Asia), said in an interview that the company’s green initiatives would diagnose, build, virtualise, manage and cool the data centres.
For instance, 3,600 Wintel (Windows-Intel) x86 machines in the company were compressed into 30 mainframes reducing use of a lot of space and power consumption.
To promote the green initiative, the company partnered Hyderabad-based ‘Ctrl S’, the first of its kind tier-IV green data centre. As part of the tie-up, ‘Ctrl S’ would provide the benefits of a green data centre to the 55 clients of IBM in the country.
Besides, ‘Ctrl S’ has plans to set up data centres in other cities.
As 60 per cent of IBM’s business comes from small and medium businesses for which IT spend is an issue, the company has introduced SMB Express programme that is given as a package of hardware, IT and its management. Virtualisation of data centres comes in handy for the company in this area. In a data centre management, 40 per cent of every kilowatt hour of energy is spent on heating, ventilation and air-conditioning and power backup like the UPS and 60 per cent on memory, fans, drives and other hardware.
Of this, only 30 per cent is used by the processor and finally 20 per cent is spent on resource usage.
The ‘Rear Door Heat eXchanger’ technology of IBM would bring down the heat exhaust by 50 per cent and the energy-efficient systems like BladeCentre would consume 30 per cent less energy.
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