Green and Beyond: More than Just the Data Center

Green energy management leads to a better business outcome—and a better world

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. Few would dispute that going green has become an essential business strategy for organizations today. By simultaneously minimizing their electrical costs and their carbon emissions footprints, companies can better position themselves for business growth and also help to create a more sustainable future for the world.

For many organizations, “going green” has been interpreted to mean “data center optimization,” and for good reason. Far more energy is consumed per square foot in data centers than in other commercial building, and information technology is one of the fastest-growing elements of overall business costs – with technology energy consumption growing 12 times overall demand [IBM Project Big Green research, 2008].

When you consider matters more holistically, though, it becomes apparent that data centers represent only a piece of the overall energy management puzzle. Globally, data centers generate only about two percent of energy consumption; the remaining ninety-eight percent must be addressed as well to achieve an optimized total outcome. Within the business sector, that implies energy management pertaining to completely different elements, such as manufacturing and distribution centers, office facilities, retail space, and even mobilie infrastructure like trucking fleets. Also relevant in this context is the full supply chain, including business partners, suppliers and vendors, as well as related issues such as water conservation, waste reduction and the use of potentially hazardous chemicals.

When you consider these issues collectively, a central truth becomes apparent: the energy management story is much larger than simply the enterprise-class data center.

IBM’s Green and Beyond: Expanding the horizons of energy management

For these reasons, IBM recently announced compelling new initiatives and capabilities at the Green and Beyond Summit held in San Francisco California. The announcements broadened the scope of energy efficiency, from the data center, to the larger question of how business can minimize energy consumption, and carbon emissions across the enterprise. IBM is extending the focus to include a wider range of infrastructure assets and business processes—through innovative solutions and cross-vendor, cross-industry collaboration designed to yield not just substantial cost reductions, but a more sustainable, renewable environment for the world as a whole.

The Green and Beyond announcement is comprised of five elements:

The Green Sigma Coalition, comprised of leaders in metering, monitoring, automation, data communications and software, which will foster new solutions for energy, water, waste and greenhouse gas management;
New energy management capabilities in IBM offerings spanning green infrastructures, sustainable solutions and intelligent systems, that in some cases integrate with offerings from third parties such as Cisco and Honeywell;
Partnerships with utility companies on demand-reduction programs;
A unique, water-cooled IBM supercomputer characterized by exceptional performance, high energy efficiency and low carbon dioxide emissions;
And a project with San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, to reduce pollution in the city’s sewer system and treatment facilities via IBM solutions.

Green Sigma Coalition

IBM’s deep commitment to developing cross-vendor, cross-sector collaboration in the pursuit of a more sustainable future is apparent in its participation in this coalition, which also includes ABB, Cisco, Eaton, ESS, Honeywell Building Technologies, Johnson Controls, SAP, Schneider Electric and Siemens Building Technologies.

Together, these participants will work together to develop new strategies and offerings designed to minimize energy costs, carbon dioxide emissions, wasted water and waste creation generally, as informed by Lean Six Sigma procedural theory. And the total improvements will be demonstrated in Green Sigma showcases—examples that clearly illustrate the fulfillment of Green Sigma goals.

In these showcases, innovative software will generate key performance indicators (KPIs) by collecting and analyzing solution data obtained via real-time metering and monitoring. These KPIs will be displayed in real-time dashboards via whatever visualization model (charts, bar graphs, health indicators, etc) are required. The outcome will be the actionable intelligence organizations need to take swift and effective action wherever, and however, it is needed in the pursuit of green guidelines, spurring both a fast response to changing conditions and a proactive approach that minimizes waste from the beginning.

IBM expects that the current list of participants in the Green Sigma Coalition will grow, and has offered an incentive to organizations that might be interested: if they meet the criteria for membership by the end of 2009, they will be considered founding members and will receive promotional benefits stemming from that designation.

New solutions with new energy management capabilities

Already, the cross-vendor collaboration encouraged by the Green Sigma Coalition has led to positive results. Consider that as part of the Green and Beyond announcement, IBM has many new and enhanced solutions, some of which integrate in new ways with offerings from alternate vendors.

IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management 6.2.1, for instance, pulls energy data from many third-party products to yield a comprehensive energy management picture spanning both data centers and facilities assets. This tool now includes expanded support for Cisco Systems, Johnson Controls, APC, Eaton, Emerson Liebert, Synapsense, Sensatronic and 1-wire.
IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager 4.2.1 includes out-of-the-box capability to develop energy dashboards to reflect not just energy-centric KPIs, but their anticipated impact on business services.
IBM Maximo Asset Management for Energy Optimization provides heat maps for data center environments, pinpointing problematic areas to suggest possible improvements. Also, provides the tools to help schedule regular maintenance on building facilities components – ensuring optimal energy performance from those infrastructure assets.
ILOG LogicNet Plus XE 7.0 allows companies to model and visualize their current supply chains, then create compare different scenarios to arrive at an optimized alternative.
WebSphere Sensor Events 6.2 collects and analyzes events generated by many classes of sensors.
Rational Focal Point 6.4, a portfolio management tool used in software development, now includes improved financial planning features.
Rational Rhapsody 7.5 enhances software component reuse across multiple products to reduce costs and accelerate rollout.

The best-in-class IBM Tivoli service management portfolio has also now generally been expanded to integrate with Cisco’s EnergyWise offering. This constitutes a clear demonstration of IBM’s pursuit of improved energy management via collaboration—with whatever approaches, technologies or systems make the most business sense for organizations today, in each unique infrastructural context—especially given the fact that EnergyWise directly competes with IBM offerings.

Furthermore, IBM Tivoli now also supports enhanced integration with Johnson Control’s Metasys tools to support facilities assets, such as building management systems, chillers, and generators. And IBM will also soon integrate Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management with Honeywell’s EBI and Trinidum tools.

Poseidon’s power over water yields energy-efficient supercomputing

Just as optimized energy management strategies are empowered by innovative software tools, they can also be supported by innovative hardware platforms—if those hardware platforms are designed for such a purpose from the start.

An excellent example of such an energy-optimized hardware platform is evident in a new supercomputer known as Poseidon which is being developed by IBM for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich. This unique supercomputer, comprised of two IBM BladeCenter servers with twenty-two Cell blades and six Intel blades, is expected to have a peak performance of ten teraflops, yet despite this performance level, it will also substantially decrease the carbon footprint of the Institute.

How much? The answer is an astonishing eighty-five percent—roughly thirty tons of carbon dioxide per year when compared to more conventional platforms cooled in more conventional ways. Furthermore, overall energy consumption is expected to fall forty percent. These impressive business benefits come as a result of Poseidon’s special water-cooled design and direct heat reuse technologies, created jointly by IBM and scientists at the Institute.

IBM partnerships spur incentives programs

Arriving at a greener, more renewable future means reducing the overall demand organizations generate in the pursuit of business operations. And if the promise of lower costs and reduced carbon emissions weren’t enough, organizations are also encouraged via fiscal incentives offered by many regulatory commissions and utilities providers worldwide.

When they reduce their demand for public resources like electricity, in other words, organizations can reap an even higher financial benefit than might otherwise be expected.

Toward that very appealing outcome, IBM is now working collaboratively with governmental, regulatory, public utility commissions and utilities providers to create programs that can create the most benefit, to the widest number of organizations, in the largest number of business contexts. In this way, organizations will minimize lower overhead, allowing them to redirect funds to innovative solutions or strategies designed to grow their market share. At the same time, their host environments will benefit through reduced carbon emissions and environmental impact.

IBM’s own recent experiences help to inform these programs. Among others, for instance, a project at IBM’s Fishkill site in New York state, developed in cooperation with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, has yielded many insights and strategies other organizations can reapply in their own incentives-driven programs, to achieve their own optimized energy management and fiscal outcomes.

Maximo delivers superior asset management of the San Francisco infrastructure

Another illustration of how IBM solutions can drive an improved, more sustainable outcome is the recent case of the San Francisco Public Utility Commission (SFPUC), which faced a common challenge: obtaining the best possible utilization of core assets by tracking and maintaining them over their full lifecycles.

In particular, the SFPUC sought to enhance maintenance operations through improved management of such physical assets as wastewater treatment machinery, large-capacity lift pumps, dewatering centrifuges, belt presses, engine generators and water collection basins. Acquiring and analyzing asset data in cases such as these, to spur an efficient and informed total response and minimize time-to-solution, is a nontrivial problem demanding best-in-class solutions.

Toward that end, the SFPUC has deployed IBM Maximo Asset Management software to achieve superior visibility in asset status and health, and suggest operational and planning decisions correspondingly. Thanks to historical work history data, for example, it becomes possible to project far more accurately when certain assets are approaching end-of-life and should be replaced, rather than wait for them to fail and attempt to mitigate the consequences at that point. The outcome is that in the last calendar year, the SFPUC’s ratio of preventative to corrective maintenance has climbed by a full eleven percent.

When unexpected problems do occur, the SFPUC can now often resolve issues in twenty-four hours or less, thanks to the component-level management and real-time status data the IBM Maximo solution provides. And because it integrates with the city’s 311 and 28-CLEAN customer service systems at dispatch centers, the city of San Francisco enjoys an extraordinarily rapid response to problem reports.