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Many greens blame the information technology ( IT) industry for emitting too much carbon dioxide by flying their personnel too often. The industry emits as much greenhouse gas in their powerguzzling offices as well. The good news is that some have started to fix the problem.
Tech giant IBM is racing up the green track to make their computer servers consume less energy. The idea is to shrink the carbon footprint of the IT and communications industry that emits about two percent of the global man- made carbon dioxide — a figure equivalent to that of the aviation industry.
Recently, an IBM fellow remarked that the company’s servers could perhaps consume enough electricity to run a small US state.
Now the company has launched, almost as a penance, Project Big Green that envisages new ways of computing for its clients along with efficient power and cooling system and energy- efficient design.
“ The idea is to cut power consumption by upto 30 to 40 percent,” said Jyoti Satyanathan, vice president ( systems and technology) at IBM India/ South Asia.
The focus is on data centres — farms of maybe thousands of servers that store, retrieve and crunch terabytes of data. These centres need to store and retrieve data of many years on a timely basis. So data centres spawn more servers that work feverishly and get hungry for more power, real estate and people.
IBM’s proposal is to reduce the number of servers by using techniques such as virtual pools of data, consolidation into more robust and powerful servers and software to run all this. “ Instead of using many small servers with 10 or 12 percent usage go for a comprehensive server with 80 percent utility,” said Satyanathan.
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