IBM Corp. on Thursday said it is investing $1 billion US in lessening the impact its businesses have on the environment.

The technology giant said it is reallocating the funds to realize a 42 per cent decrease in its data centres' energy consumption, avoiding some 5 billion kilowatt hours of new power use a year across the, on average, 25,000-square-foot facilities, as IBM seeks to double its computing capacity.

The avatar, or graphic representation, of IBM researcher Donna Dillenberger stands in a new video-game-like 3-D virtual environment that she and her team built to help improve the company's power management.
(IBM)

Project Big Green is to use the work of more than 850 experts in the effort to make the data centres more energy efficient, which the company says will result in savings equivalent to some 6,748.5 tons of carbon emissions.

That amount of energy saved is likely to have an impact on IBM's bottom line, according to research by analysis firm IDC. For every dollar spent on computer hardware, 50 cents is spent on energy — a figure that is projected to rise to 71 cents by 2010.

IBM plans to extend its data centre greening efforts to its clients, offering to do for them what it is doing for its own business.

"The data centre energy crisis is inhibiting our clients' business growth as they seek to access computing power," said Mike Daniels, senior vice-president of IBM's global technology services division.

"Many data centres have now reached full capacity, limiting a firm's ability to grow and make necessary capital investments. Today we are providing clients the IBM action plan to make their data centres fully utilized and energy efficient."

Computer processors' computing and energy efficiency decline as they heat up. Because they generate heat as a byproduct of working, there is a limit to how many units can operate within a finite space.

Improving the energy efficiency of the centres — and thereby reducing the heat produced — could help to maximize processing power and enable data centres to cram more machines into a single facility.

Energy efficiency services, information site planned

IBM's plan has five components:

• Diagnosing facilities by examining a data centre's energy efficiency, constructing a 3-D model to identify temperature distributions in the space and manage power distribution, and finding and fixing hot spots.
• Planning, building or updating data centres to be energy efficient.
• Moving clients away from dedicated machines to ones that can run software on a variety of operating systems, which would consolidate work onto fewer pieces of hardware.
• Managing power use through software that puts idle machines into a low-power standby mode. IBM estimates this alone could save 5.4 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year — enough to heat 370,000 homes for a winter — if all of the data centres in the United States, including IBM's, made use of such programs.
• Cooling data centres with liquid — as opposed to forced-air — cooling systems.

The company also plans to launch a website that will outline energy-efficiency incentives and programs available from utilities, governments and other agencies anywhere in the world.