Article: Going green at Big Blue

Monday August 11, 2008

PETALING JAYA: In a bid to promote green computing, enterprise software company IBM Corp has modified its datacentre equipment to be more energy efficient.

The company is moving away from custom-designed datacentres to more scalable, standard designs inn order to be more energy efficient and to meet business technology needs in the long run.

Wally Karrat, green technology engineering professional at IBM, said the effective use of energy has become a global issue of late since the dramatic increase in the price of fossil fuels, which he said has doubled in the past year.

The rise in energy cost has also led to a change in the design of datacentres, aiming now for such facilities to be more sustainable and energy efficient.

"Previous datacentre designs did not take energy efficiency into consideration so we cannot continue with the old designs," Karrat said at a press briefing at the IBM Malaysia headquarters here recently.

Datacentres, he said generally use and waste a lot of energy, and the usage doubles about every five years as storage requirements and computing power requirements increase.

"Company servers have grown six times during the last decade while storage requirements have grown 59 times," Karrat explained.

He said that the more energy used, the more carbon dioxide is emitted and this is harmful to the environment.

However, he said, the shocking reality is that datacentre hardware only uses 30% of the energy in those facilities. The rest goes to supporting equipment such as the cooling systems and the uninterrupted power supply.

"So it's not just hardware that we need to worry about. It's about making the whole gamut of the datacentre more energy efficient," he said, adding that IBM is currently conducting research into how to achieve this goal.

What's your PUE

To be considered energy efficient, Karrat said, datacentre hardware has to achieve between 1.5 and 2 PUE (power-usage efficiency) levels.

PUE is an energy efficiency metric proposed by The Green Grid, a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in datacentres and business computing ecosystems.

Most datacentres, Karrat said, run at 2.3 PUE. This means that for every kilowatt used to run hardware, another 2.3 kilowatts is used for cooling purposes.

"Our research shows that by reducing the PUE to between 1.5 and 2, businesses can save up to 44% off their datacentre operational costs," he said.

Karrat cited an example of a company that had a datacentre running at 2.3 PUE. The company would have spent a total of US$245mil (RM809mil) over 20 years, operating the datacentre.

"If the datacentre had been designed to be energy efficient, the operating cost would only have amounted to US$166mil (RM545mil), so there is a benefit in building energy-efficient datacentres," he said.

He said that IBM's customers are also heeding the call to use green computing because of the cost savings. "Savings will always be a driver for going green and both our existing and new customers like that idea" he said.

Green computing, he added, is popular in the United States and is getting good response in Asia.

Go virtual

IBM's datacentre hardware, Karrat said, runs at 1.5 PUE and is built as an open architecture so other third-party products can operate with them.

Among IBM's energy-efficient range of datacentre products is its z10 EC servers, Power Systems servers, and Rear Door Heat eXchanger.

The z10 EC, coupled with IBM's System X iDataplex solution, is claimed to reduce energy consumption dramatically, while the Heat eXchanger is very efficient at eliminating heat generated by datacentres, helping to reduce the cost of running cooling systems.

IBM is also encouraging its clients to opt for virtualisation in order to save more on energy costs.

Virtual servers, Karrat said, are able to run at 70% to 80% capacity compared to normal servers, saving companies operating costs as well as floor space at datacentres.

He cited an example of a bank in China that saved up to US$180mil (RM594mil) in operating costs just by reducing its 38 datacentres to two through virtualisation.

"Before virtualisation, the bank's servers were operating at 20% capacity but using 95% of the available energy," he said. Going green in computing also means being able to measure and manage proper energy utilisation in datacentres.

Karrat said, IBM is helping companies do this through a software developed by its subsidiary, Tivoli.

Tivoli's Green Management software helps IT administrators measure and manage energy flows in datacentres from a single screen.

This article was taken from: The Star Online: Technology: Corporate IT:11 August 2008