IBM Touts Data Centre Carbon Reduction

IBM has touted the ability to save million of dollars in power costs after it utilised a solar farm to reduce the carbon footprint of one of its data centres in India.

The development comes as Big Blue rolls out a $1 billion (£610m) global data centre expansion program, to deal with the growing demand for cloud services.

Carbon Reduction

IBM said that its data centre in Bengaluru (also known as Bangalore) has a 50 kW solar farm on its roof, to provide power directly to the facility’s equipment. IBM first revealed this development back in 2011, but has now told the Economic Times that the solar power is fed directly to the servers, instead of being converted to AC and then to DC, which helps prevent power loss of 15 percent.

The zEC12 mainframe inside the data centre runs on solar power, water cooling, and high voltage direct current technologies.

“In a country like India where reliable power connectivity is a big challenge, these three technologies have opened up new possibilities in the area of energy efficiencies,” Sandesh Bhat, VP India Software Labs at IBM was quoted as saying.

He also said that the technologies have reduced the data centre carbon footprint by about 40 percent, and will be rolling this out to all of its data centres in India. It will also sell this solution to its client base, and the solution can be used to satisfy India’s need for high-end data centres, without greatly expanding its carbon footprint.

Data Centre Expansion

IBM data centres are already recognised for their energy efficiency. And of course the company is involved in a global expansion of its data centre portfolio, centred on its SoftLayer subsidiary. In October, IBM revealed that a new SoftLayer Cloud data centre will open in Paris before the end of the year.

IBM bought SoftLayer back in June 2013 and, following that deal, it quickly opted to make SoftLayer the centre of IBM’s cloud services offering.

In June this year Big Blue announced that a London data centre would be built in Chessington in order to satisfy London customers’ need to keep their data local.

That data centre was one of fifteen being built around the world, in an expansion plan that will bring the total IBM portfolio to 40 data centres across five continents.

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