by Shane Henson — January 11, 2012—IBM, a leading manufacturer and seller of computer hardware and software, has made energy efficiency within its data centers a key business and environmental goal, and its efforts have not gone unnoticed. Recently, the European Commission (EC), the executive body of the European Union, awarded 27 IBM data centers for energy efficiency, based on the European Union (EU) Code of Conduct for Data Centers. The honor represents the largest portfolio of data centers from a single company to receive the recognition.
The EU Code of Conduct was created in response to increasing energy consumption in data centers. The EU aims to inform and encourage data center operators and owners to reduce energy consumption in a cost-effective manner without decreasing mission-critical data center functions. The assessment is made against a set of best practices to reduce energy losses, which include the usage of energy-efficient hardware, installing free cooling and cold aisle containment.
In May 2011, the Uptime Institute, an organization providing thought leadership for the enterprise data center industry and for data center professionals, gave IBM data centers a rating of 1.65 for average power usage effectiveness compared to the industry average of 1.8. Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is an indicator for how efficiently a computer data center uses its power, notes IBM.
The 27 honored IBM green data centers represent over 70 percent of IBM’s strategic outsourcing data centers in 15 European countries, according to the company. Many of the data centers have also been designed to support cloud computing, in an effort to help clients around the world operate smarter. The energy improvements implemented in these data centers helped IBM meet a goal set in 2007 to double the IT (information technology) capacity of its data centers within three years without increasing the power consumption, adds the company.
