photo: IBM
As spring approaches, the greening of Corporate America continues
apace. First financial services giant Citi (C) this week unveiled a $50 billion green investment initiative and today IBM (IBM) said it will spend a billion a year to green energy-hogging data centers. The Big Green project will deploy 850 "energy efficiency architects" to evaluate electricity usage in its data centers and those of its clients and then use a mix of hardware and software technologies to cut power consumption by 42 percent. That will eliminate an estimated 7,439 tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year, according to IBM. The tech giant said the Big Green initiative will allow it to double computing capacity without spiking energy usage or increasing CO2 emissions. Meanwhile, California utility PG&E (PCG) said today it’s working with IBM to slash electricity consumption in its West Coast data centers by 80 percent. The utility will accomplish that in part by replacing Unix 300 servers with six IBM System p5 servers. Use of IBM’s virtualization software will increase the server’s utilization from 10 percent of capacity to more than 80 percent while a water-cooling technology will cut heat emissions from the servers by 60 percent.
Green Wombat 
I’ve posted on IBM’s stock site about geothermal power. The only company I could find that seems to have the manpower and resources to effectively produce geothermal power is Vulcan Power out of Bend, OR. As a retired Air Force vet, with combat experience in Korea and Vietnam, I believe everything we can do to get our troops out of the war in the Middle East by reducing our need for oil is in America’s interest
I hope that the projected 7000 plus tons in annual Co2 reductions was not generated by IBM’s energy efficiency architects because potential annual reductions of this magnitude apply to small data centers.The worldwide Co2 reduction potential from IBM data center operations should be in millions of tons.
[…] was reading recently about IBM’s Big Green initiative, launched last year. There are many different components to this plan, but their recent […]