IBM Software Goes Green, While Hardware Costs Drop

IBM Corp. announced an expanded initiative to help customers run their operations in a more energy efficient mode. Included in that framework are Tivoli software offerings that aim to unite business services, facilities, and data centers for energy efficiency. Elsewhere, IBM also announced a new IBM BladeCenter called i Edition Express for BladeCenter S.

Focal Points:

• IBM is promoting many of its existing software technologies as a means of helping drive more energy efficient operations. The company suggests operational improvements are needed in the areas of employee work practices, workload management and definition, and infrastructure provisioning. To reduce energy consumption, IBM recommends customers employ online collaboration technologies including e-mail, instant messaging, document collaboration, online learning, and software development coordination toolsets from Lotus and Rational. Workload management improvements are enabled using application consolidation, business process modeling, energy cost allocation and billing, human task automation software, and service oriented architectures (SOAs) to drive efficiencies and interconnections. Infrastructure improvements can be delivered by adopting virtualized environments, data compression, de-duplicating unnecessary redundancies, and optimizing energy usage with tracking, indexing, monitoring, and metering frameworks. IBM referenced several improvements at a variety of its accounts ranging from headcount reductions, floor space elimination, server consolidation, and telecommuting strategies.
• The company also released details about new green service management capabilities enabled by a new set of Tivoli software tools. Tivoli's tools work together to deliver an integrated approach to controlling data center energy costs by providing visibility, control, and automation capabilities. At the heart of the offering is Tivoli's new Tivoli Monitoring for Green Energy product, which can monitor power consumption, alert server administrators when thresholds are reached, and works with several software vendor partners to trigger other software operations. Trends can be monitored and tracked over time and utilization levels can be compared to desired states. Additionally, the software can optimize assets by their energy usage levels, provision new services based on environmental characteristics, and enable intelligent chargebacks based on actual consumption rates. The software solution works together with Tivoli's Maximo Enterprise Asset Management, Tivoli Business Service Manager dashboard, Tivoli Provisioning Manager, and Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager.
• IBM's new i Edition Express for IBM BladeCenter S is a new Power 6-based blade offering that can run both System i and Microsoft Corp. Windows workloads. Complete with 2 gigabytes (GB) of memory and two 146 GB hot-swappable drives, the i Edition Express for IBM BladeCenter S is more powerful and the same price as a previous-generation System i 520. On a monthly fair market value (FMV) lease, the BladeCenter S including a six-slot chassis (the chassis lease runs 60 months in this example) runs $338 over a 36-month term, which is less per month than the monthly maintenance required on older IBM System i models. Since IBM expects customers to add computing capacity over time, it has pre-stated the blade pricing. An i Edition Express for IBM BladeCenter S blade leased at time of launch for 36 months will run $280 per month, while additional blades can be added 12 months out for $179 per month for a 24-month lease. This will allow for all blades to be upgraded at the 36 month period simultaneously.

Experton Group believes green IT and operational strategies are among the top five drivers of enterprise purchasing and architectural decisions. To that end, IBM's $1 billion annual budget to fund its Project Green Computing Initiative is helping to aggressively align its product and service offerings to help enable more efficient operations.

Corporations will need to enact iterative architectural engagement plans and processes that first leverage some of the lower-hanging fruit including collaborative software technologies, telecommuting, while also embarking on more costly and complex server consolidation and virtualization. IT executives should understand how selected vendors intend to integrate their product sets with vendor partners as heterogeneous computing environments and legacy architectures make planning and implementation of complex new architectures a long-term challenge and a potential black hole of problems. Key technologies will include intelligent monitoring, management, and action frameworks such as those provided by Tivoli that can take action based on defined thresholds and business process rules.

IBM's new i Edition Express for IBM BladeCenter S is a cost effective blade server offering able to consolidate IBM i and Windows workloads in a "pay as you grow" environment. IBM is encouraging customers to upgrade to the latest technology by making new lease prices so cost affordable that a new system can run less than the maintenance plan of older boxes. Moreover, IBM's pre-stated pricing allows businesses to effectively plan business growth and demonstrates how the company intends to make technologies radically less expensive over time. IT executives with older IBM i hardware should seriously consider evaluating new IBM equipment to lower their monthly run rates by consolidating and replacing older hardware.