IBM Data Centres Get Green Kudos From EU

Computing giant, IBM has been recognised by the European Commission for the energy efficiency of its European data centres.

Twenty-seven of IBM’s European data centres have been recognised by the EU, as comlpying with the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres, a voluntary best-practice guide to making data centres which use energy efficiently and have a reduced carbon footprint.

IBM Greens Europe

“The awarded 27 IBM Green Data Centres represent over 70 percent of IBM’s strategic outsourcing data centres in 15 European countries. The energy improvements implemented in these data centres helped IBM meet a goal to double their IT capacity within three years without increasing their power consumption,” said a statement by IBM.

The European Commission, which sets the benchmark for the assessment, is working to inform and encourage data centre operators and owners to reduce energy consumption in a cost-effective manner without decreasing mission critical data centre functions.

The Code of Conduct has been created to improve energy efficiency in data centres running in the region as a result of the environmental, economic and energy supply issues stemming from this growing market.

According to the statement, the data centres were assessed against a set of best practices in the reduction of energy losses including the use of energy efficient hardware, installing free cooling and cold aisle containment. “Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is an indicator for how efficiently a computer data centre uses its power. In May, the Uptime Institute gave IBM data centres a rating of 1.65 for average power usage compared to the industry average of 1.8” it said.

IBM uses analytics to operate its data centres, using thousands of sensors to record and analyse temperatures and air flow to detect hot and cold spots in order to efficiently cool its data centres with a high measure of security and reliability and significant reduction in costs.