IBM Develops Datacenter Energy Reduction Software, Strategies

May 2, 2008

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IBM announced new energy-management software, an expansion of its energy certificates program, and an energy benchmark to help clients establish energy efficiency goals, optimize for energy efficiency and measure and verify their green IT progress across the enterprise.

IBM’s new offerings for energy management include its new Active Energy Manager software, an expansion of IBM’s Energy Certificates program to 34 countries, and an online energy assessment benchmark.

The software measures power use of key datacenter elements and allows IT managers to control and set caps on their energy use for servers, storage, and networking, as well as the air conditioning and power management systems that keep the data center running, the company said.

The certificates can be traded for cash on the growing energy efficiency certificate market or retained to demonstrate reductions in energy use and associated CO2 emissions.

IBM also announced a free, on-line energy benchmark tool that provides actionable insight into a company’s IT-related energy efficiency status. Produced by The Bathwick Group, the tool allows clients to measure their efficiency score against other organizations worldwide.

In other IBM news, the company has also announced the creation of an alliance for independent hardware and software vendors to support industry standards for new enterprise data centers, which are more energy efficient, virtualized, and resilient.

The alliance is targeted at independent hardware and software vendors that specialize in elements crucial to data centers, including networking, virtualization, facilities management, platforms, operating systems, storage, and systems management. IT vendors in support of the program include Brocade, Citrix, Eaton, Emulex, Juniper Networks, Novell, RedHat, Sun and VMware.

The importance of interoperability and open standards for new enterprise data centers — including those for energy management, virtualization, networking, security, and service management, among others — is a focal point of this program.

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