IBM Launches “Green Alliance”

By Greg McNevin

May 2, 2008: With data centre’s becoming significant sources of pollution IBM has decided to pull together a swathe of like-minded companies to create a new green alliance to push energy efficiency standards for new enterprise data centres.

The program seeks to bring together independent hardware and software vendors to create data centres that are dramatically more energy efficient, virtualised, and resilient. The alliance also seeks to push the importance of interoperability and open standards, particularly in regards to energy management, virtualisation, networking, security, and service management.

IBM says that vendors who support energy efficiency standards can enable end-to-end management and monitoring of power and cooling of hardware, paving the way for greater data centre efficiency by setting caps on energy use, shifting resources to meet business requirements, or adjusting workloads to avoid higher billing rates.

So far Brocade, Citrix, Eaton, Emulex, Juniper Networks, Novell, RedHat, Sun and VMware have signed on the program, with Brocade’s Marty Lans, Sr. Director, Data Center Marketing, noting that it is a “great opportunity to further our Data Centre Fabric strategy to help IBM customers evolve their data centres.”

“IBM's commitment to open standards and interoperability will be beneficial in supporting high levels of performance and end-to-end interoperability across the new enterprise data centre ecosystem,” says Lans.

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