OBBeC.com

Armonk, NY (OBBeC) - IBM recently announced the IT Carbon Strategy Study, a new service which the company claims is to help clients starting on their green transformation identify the most rapid areas of reduction in IT carbon emission across the infrastructure.

Part of IBM's Project Big Green initiative, the service enables clients to develop the guiding principles for becoming a greener enterprise and create recommendations for the actions they can take to achieve those goals. The service assesses the entire IT enterprise, not just the data centre.

"Significant reduction in carbon footprint can be achieved in often-overlooked areas such as desktop systems, networking components, server rooms and printers that can contribute more than 50 percent of the total energy consumption for IT," said Jeanine Cotter, vice president for IBM's IT Strategy and Architecture services.

The assessment includes both the data centre and the distributed environment including offices, retail stores, and warehouses. The IT Carbon Strategy Study provides clients specific recommendations on project priorities with the biggest potential gains. Projects could comprise the network, printers, distributed servers (server closets outside the data centre), facilities upgrades like heating, venting, and air conditioning (HVAC) and universal power supplies (UPS), desktop computers and monitors.

A typical three-to-four week study includes a kick-off workshop to agree on overall objectives and targets, data gathering and data analysis leveraging a carbon impact analysis tool to help assess cost benefit analysis. After completing an action oriented workshop, clients are presented with the results in a report including the specific findings and recommendations.