IBM on Thursday unveiled a $1 billion-a-year service initiative aimed at building and redesigning datacenters that consume less energy.
At a press conference in New York City, the company debuted Project Big Green, which will call on 850 Global Technology Services employees to redesign IBM's own data centers and those of its customers.

"Large companies are facing a large crisis around energy," says Mike Daniels, senior vice president of IBM Global Technology Services. "This issue is surfacing in a number of different ways, whether it's the capital required to build new data centers because people are out of capacity, or where people are out of power or trying to manage that power. We think this is an issue where we can provide leadership for the industry and for our clients."

IBM claims that the savings for customers are great in going green -- by using IBM technologies such as their blade servers instead of other vendor's technologies, a customer with a 25,000-square-foot data center should be able to save as much as 42 percent on energy consumption.

That savings is huge, says IDC, which estimates that for every dollar spent on computer hardware, another 50 cents is spent on energy. This amount, IDC says, is expected to increase to more than 71 cents by 2011.

The Big Green initiative also will net IBM lots of dollars. The company has put the "$1 billion" stamp on two past initiatives: Its $500 million investment in e-commerce in 2000 netted the company $1 billion in Web-hosting services contracts a year later. Also in 2000, IBM announced it had already spent $1 billion on promoting Linux and that in 2001 it would spend an equivalent amount.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is one of the customers that says it already has benefited from IBM's green initiative. The company used IBM diagnostic technology at three data centers to measure and identify hot spots, air leakage and other inefficiencies across 40,000 square feet of data-center space. Had PG&E surveyed this space manually, it would have taken several weeks instead of a few days.

"The real key to us is on energy efficiency and reducing the demand for energy both for us and our customers," says Brad Whitcomb, PC&E vice president of customer products and services.

Further, by using IBM virtualization technology to consolidate 300 Unix servers into six IBM System p servers, PG&E expects to reduce energy consumption by 80 percent. PG&E also will deploy IBM Rear Door Heat eXchanger water-cooling technology on the System p servers to reduce heat in the data center by as much as 60 percent.

IBM also will benefit from the use of its technologies in going green. The company is redesigning more than 8 million square feet of data centers worldwide. It expects to reduce energy use by five billion kilowatt-hours per year, while doubling its data centers' computing capacity.

The Project Big Green service, which IBM will offer at a cost, has five components: diagnosis, building, virtualization, provisioning and cooling. It will start with a diagnosis of a customer's existing facilities and include an energy assessment, a three-dimensional power analysis and thermal analytics. A diagnostic component called the IBM Data Center Energy Efficiency Assessment rates the energy efficiency of the data center and presents a plan to increase it.

Another diagnostic service called Mobile Measurement Technology measures temperature distributions in data centers and gathers thermal data on hot spots, air leakage and other inefficiencies. Further, IBM will provide a Thermal Analysis for High Density Computing service that identifies and resolves heat-related issues and provides options for power savings.

Diagnosis will then turn to a building phase, which helps customers plan, build or update energy-efficient data centers. IBM will provide an Energy Efficiency Self Assessment that gives customers a view of their data center's energy efficiency. The company also will offer preconfigured, 500-square-foot or 1,000-square-foot Scalable Modular Data Centers, which can be implemented in eight to 12 weeks. IBM also will provide cabling recommendations for improving air flow beneath data-center floors and reducing cabling expenditures.

The next step in the initiative is the virtualization of customers' server and storage infrastructure and the deployment of energy-saving special-purpose processors, such as the Cell processor. Using the company's BladeCenter servers with embedded Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches, for example, can save customers 50 percent of the power per port compared with a typical rack-mounted server.

Customers then will be encouraged to use power and provisioning software to reduce server and storage energy consumption and to cool the data center inside and out with liquid-cooling technologies. The company unveiled the IBM Data Center Stored Cooling Solution and recommended the use of its Rear Door Heat eXchanger for its servers. The company also plans to introduce a new set of liquid-cooling technologies later this year.