IBM warms to utilities in energy efficiency drive

IBM's top hardware executive, William Zeitler, will deliver a keynote speech at a large utility industry conference to make the case for bridging the worlds of IT and electricity.

Zeitler, senior vice president of IBM's Systems and Technology Group, will speak at the Edison Electric Institute's annual meeting in Toronto on Monday, where he is expected to announce that New York utility Consolidation Edison intends to participate in a data center energy efficiency incentive program with IBM.

"We want to challenge the (electricity) industry to stop thinking about lighting and motors--the traditional stuff--and look at IT as a big user of electricity," said Steve Cole, program manager for energy efficiency at IBM.

It is estimated that data centers alone consume about 2 percent of the world's electricity. And the rate of energy usage--and spending--is going up steadily.

With the rising cost of electricity and growing environmental awareness, IBM and other IT vendors have invested in more energy-efficient computing gear.

There are several technologies, such as virtualization and techniques for lowering energy usage. Yet, for the most part, energy remains outside the purview of IT managers.

IBM's senior vice president Bill Zeitler

(Credit: IBM)

A recent IBM customer survey found that only 26 percent of IT managers had responsibility for energy usage; most don't even see the bill.

IBM is seeking to co-market with utilities to promote energy efficiency, Cole said. While IBM deals with IT professions, utilities have customer relationships with the facilities managers at companies that deal with energy procurement and management.

Con Edison will make customers aware of an energy efficiency program that IBM offers in which companies that lower their energy consumption can sell "energy efficiency certificates."

Cole said measuring efficiency will become easier once a standard EnergyStar rating for servers and storage is completed.

[dbargen]

Oh Boy! Yet another certificate you can acquire that no one else really cares about. As someone who's had to utilize the whole L.E.E.D. design process and green design propoganda, let me tell you, it's nothing more than a checklist of costs you can bill to you client that rarely ends up saving them enough money in energy costs to make up for the investments. Making computing more efficient is one of the widely used methods to make it more powerful, but to literally BUY a certificate just so you can place it on a wall, get a plaque made, or get on some national list that no one really cares about is just another swindle to suck you dry. Why not just call it a glorified energy indulgence and be done with it?

Saving energy is particularly important to mobile users who have a finite power supply. You could even justify efforts like these if you need to get a lot of computing power in a small space within a building. But to lower energy usage for its own sake, despite what it may do to overall cost of power or available power and storage space is ludicrous. To have IBM of all companies play the "me-too" card to get on the puce bandwagon is a sad farce. Chalk up one more company that on the surface, at least, professes the puce faith and touts it as a reason to buy their product. Meanwhile thinking people will watch the bottom line first and foremost, and to hell with pucepeace.

[carlhage]

Besides having IT managers be responsible for energy usage, it doesn't help that the companies selling servers don't disclose the typical power usage. They disclose GHz and number of cores but not MWh or real performance, and most power is wasted by CPUs at idle. Refrigerators reduced energy consumption by 75% after the yellow "energy-guide" stickers were required. It could be even greater with computers. All plug-in electronics need an energy usage sticker. (A 500W server would use 43MWh over ten years, but the air conditioning needs to be included as well.) It would also help to have standard benchmarks, e.g. measuring typical profiles of web server use over a day to measure w/peak-transactions.