IBM continues green machine theme

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 21 May 2008 05:34

Business IT - Technology

IBM's been pushing better energy efficiency for data centres for a year, and has now introduced a new set of offerings to help its customers meet that goal.

The latest announcements fall into three main categories: reducing the resource requirements of software, thus requiring less hardware than would otherwise have been needed; improving the management of data centre equipment; and reducing the need for people to travel.

Examples include improvements to IBM Active Energy Manager, the forthcoming Lotus Domino 8.5 bringing disk space savings, and Rational Team Concert to support multi-site software development and collaboration.

IBM also aims to help its customers meet the compliance aspects of environmental regulation with IBM Compliance Warehouse for Legal Control.

"The explosion of computers and networks have helped make the Internet and computing what it is today, but mounting energy and environmental costs associated with the technology systems that comprise this infrastructure are taking their toll," said Al Zollar, general manager, Tivoli Software, IBM.

"While most people think of energy conservation from a hardware perspective, increasingly it is actually software that is providing more options to go green across the entire organisation."

The company is also offering self-assessment tools to help organisations identify starting points for reducing energy consumption.

The announcements, made at IBM's Pulse 2008 conference in Florida, are part of the company's Project Big Green - a $US1 billion per year initiative for improving the energy efficiency of data centres.