Color Me IBM

If any company in the computer industry can be described as "colorful," it has to be IBM. Granted, that might be difficult to swallow if you still think of Big Blue as a grey-suit, white-shirt, black-wingtips kind of organization. But that isn't necessarily the case anymore.

Take the color "blue," for instance. It was 10 years ago today that IBM's Deep Blue became the first computer to win a chess tournament against a reigning world champion chess master. Deep Blue had 32 processors and could process about 200 million chess moves per second in its historic six-game match against Garry Kasparov. Today, Blue Gene is the fastest supercomputer in the world and the descendent of Deep Blue, uses 131,000 processors to routinely handle 280 trillion operations every second. A single scientist with a calculator would have to work non-stop for 177,000 years to perform the operations that Blue Gene can do in one second.

Then there is the color "green." IBM's Project Big Green is an initiative that targets corporate data centers where energy constraints and costs can limit their ability to grow. According to IDC's Worldwide Server Power and Cooling Expense 2006–2010 Forecast, approximately 50 cents is spent on energy for every dollar of computer hardware. This is expected to increase by 54 percent to 71 cents over the next four years. IBM is "redirecting" (hmmm, not sure what that means?) $1 billion per year across its businesses to increase the level of energy efficiency in IT. The plan includes new products and services for IBM and its clients to reduce data center energy consumption, transforming public technology infrastructures into "green" data centers. The savings are substantial -- for an average 25,000 square foot data center, clients should be able to achieve 42 percent energy savings. Based on the U.S. energy mix, this saves about 7,439 tons of carbon emissions saved per year.

"The data center energy crisis is inhibiting our clients’ business growth as they seek to access computing power," said Mike Daniels, senior vice president, IBM Global Technology Services. "Many data centers have now reached full capacity, limiting a firm’s ability to grow and make necessary capital investments."

IBM currently runs the world’s largest commercial technology infrastructure, with more than 8 million square feet of data centers in six continents. By using the same energy efficiency initiatives it is offering clients, IBM expects to double the computing capacity of its data centers within the next three years without increasing power consumption or its carbon footprint. Compared to doubling the size of its data centers by building out new space, IBM expects this will help save more than 5 billion kilowatt hours of energy per year.

Finally, there's the color "red." In the scope of things, this doesn't compare to a breadth of Project Green or the power of Deep Blue. Still, IBM's initiative to encourage the growth of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z mainframes is a step forward for Linux and open source. In particular, Big Blue and Red Hat are highlighting the security advantages of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and System z. These include the physical security associated with a centralized mainframe server and storage installation, and the use of virtualization technologies such as logical partitions (LPARs), which divide the extensive resources of the mainframe between workloads, while securely isolating each application from the others.

See, a colorful outfit. Who said Big Blue was still just blue?

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:36 AM  Permalink