IBM to lower data centre carbon footprint by 40 per cent to cut power bills

BENGALURU: Sitting atop IBM's research lab in Bengaluru, a 50 kW solar farm powers the American technology and consulting company's latest mainframe server located on the ground floor of the building. Inside the data centre, the solar power is directly sent to the servers instead of being converted to AC and then again to DC, preventing power loss of about 15 per cent. The mainframe server does not require any additional cooling costs as small streams of water take away heat generated by each chip using IBM's chip-level cooling technology.

This energy-efficient zEC12 mainframe server that runs on solar power, water cooling and high-voltage direct current technologies has been built completely in this lab. "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," said Sandesh Bhat, vice president, India Software Labs at IBM, adding that technologies also reduce data centre carbon footprint by about 40 per cent.

With the exponential increase in data being generated through growing mobile usage, cloud computing and the Internet of Things, energy consumption in data centres is increasing rapidly. Data centres require energy in order to organise, process and store the huge amounts of data on large computing systems and also keep them at operating temperature, especially under stressful climatic conditions.

With some data centres consuming power in the range of hundreds of megawatts, the net power consumption of data centres across the world ranges in hundreds of gigawatts and is growing rapidly. Thus a 40 per cent cut in carbon footprint can help a large data centre save millions of dollars in reduced power bills. IBM said it will be upgrading all its India centres to utilise the new mainframe server and also use it for its soon-tobe-launched cloud data centre in the country.

The company is also working with clients across different verticals to sell this solution. In a country like India where data centre requirement has suddenly shot up, IBM believes its technology can fulfil the country's need for high-end data centres without expanding the carbon footprint to a great extent.