Big Blue Going Quite Green These Days

IBM is leading the charge on a new "green" industry initiative in creating an alliance focused on using metering, monitoring, automation, data communications and software to develop “smart solutions” for energy, water, waste and greenhouse gas management

The effort, announced shortly before Big Blue’s Green and Beyond Summit held last week in San Francisco, includes new computing systems, partnerships and research for cutting energy costs and energy consumption in a more environmentally accountable and socially responsible way.

The alliance, called the Green Sigma Coalition, includes big names such as Cisco, Siemens Building Technologies division, Johnson Controls and Honeywell Building to name just a few key leaders.

The group will be using Lean Six Sigma principles and practices in its Green Sigma solution that will use real time monitoring and advanced analytics to help businesses make smarter and more efficient decisions around water use, waste, emissions control and energy use.

"It is becoming increasingly important that we use energy more efficiently both to better utilize the resource and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," said Dr. Richard L. Sandor, chairman and founder of the Chicago Climate Exchange, in a press statement.

In addition, IBM announced that it will work with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich to build a first-of-its-kind water-cooled supercomputer that will re-purpose excess heat for the university buildings. The system, named Aquasar, could decrease the carbon footprint of the Institute by up to 85 percent.

The supercomputer will be built using IBM BladeCenter servers with 22 Cell blades and six Intel blades with a Nehalem processor and will have a peak performance of about 10 teraflops.

One data storage expert, Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, told Tonic.com while “Green IT" has been "a cause célèbre" for the past few years, it still remains notable as an example of doing well by doing good.

“One can have one’s green and count it, too, so to speak,” said King, adding that issues related to energy-efficient server, storage and networking hardware and related software can be both concrete and sublime.

That, he explained, makes one wonder why so many IT vendors fail to push the green envelope much beyond the datacenter.

“Datacenters are conspicuous consumers (and often, wasters) of power, so instituting bang-on energy-reduction strategies can translate into an impressive number of bucks,” said the analyst.