IBM cuts fuel bill by 80% in huge IT move

IBM’s putting its money where its mouth is. Rather than banging on about what it can sell, the folks over at Big Blue have opted to cut their energy bills and make a stand on the green front.

As always, you have to ask what came first – the need to be green or cheaper bills. But who cares! It’s a good move.

The move to mainframe computing means that PCs will be chucked out and everyone there will work on what’s called ‘thin clients’ – i.e. staff just all work from one big computer and each have a monitor and keyboard.

IBM told Greenbang last week that PCs are used between five and ten per cent of their capacity. When you think about that they all have their own internal storage and disk space. The other one to look out for is UNIX systems. They typically run between ten and 20 per cent. Mainframes is between 85 and 90 per cent. [Greenbang asks – what does IBM sell!]

Anyway – here’s the good stuff from a press release.

IBM is to consolidate about almost 4,000 computer servers onto about 30 mainframes (bigger computers) that run the open source operating system, Linux.

The company anticipates it will save 80 per cent of the energy it currently consumes as the project goes ahead over five years.

The initiative is part of Project Big Green, a commitment that IBM announced in May to sharply reduce data center energy consumption for IBM and its clients.

IBM, with over 8,000,000 square feet of data center space (equivalent to 139 football fields), operates some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated data center operations, with major locations in New York, Connecticut, Colorado, the United Kingdom, Japan and Australia.

“The mainframe is the single most powerful instrument to drive better economics and energy conservation at the data center today,” said James Stallings, general manager, IBM System z mainframe.

“By moving globally onto the mainframe platform, IBM is creating a technology platform that saves energy while positioning our IT assets for flexibility and growth.”
IBM plans to recycle the 3,900 servers through IBM Global Asset Recovery Services.