BANGALORE, INDIA: Project Big Green, an IBM service initiative is aimed at building and redesigning datacenters that consume less energy. With the launch of its second phase of the project, the team from IBM Global Technology Services (GTS) is now targeting large corporate customers in India. 

The initiative for an average 25,000 square foot data centre, the potential energy savings should be upwards of 42 percent, which based on the US energy terms, would equate to a 7,439-tonne reduction in carbon emissions per year.

Addressing a group of CIOs at the "Technology Gourmet" event held here, Steven Sams, vice-president global site & facilities, IBM GTS said: "Large companies are facing a huge energy crisis. This issue is surfacing in a number of different ways and data centers are doubling ever five years. In fact, by 2030 and it is estimated that eight percent of the energy on this planet will be consumed by the data centers."

The event was organized by CIOL, (India's largest IT portal) in association with IBM India.

IBM claims that the savings for customers are great in going green, by using IBM technologies such as their blade servers instead of other vendor's technologies, a customer with a 25,000-square-foot data center should be able to save as much as 42 percent on energy consumption.

Sams cited the example of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E), one of the customers that has already benefited from IBM's green initiative. The company used IBM diagnostic technology at three data centers to measure and identify hot spots, air leakage and other inefficiencies across 40,000 square feet of data center space. Had PG&E surveyed this space manually, it would have taken several weeks instead of a few days. 

In a recent report, Sams said that $30-$50 million will be needed to run data centers that would be amount to 75 percent of the energy costs. The Project Big Green was launched in 2007 and has outlined a five-step approach to improving energy efficiency.