Easier to be Green outside of North American and Europe by Doug Mohney

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Nov 10 2009) Power and Cooling

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   Easier to be green outside of North America and Europe

    With a trio of announcements, IBM finds an embrace of Green IT data center practices outside of North America and Europe.  EWeek.com reports the company is going to build energy-efficient data centers in Brazil, Slovakia, and India. The reasons behind the deals shouldn't be surprising.

    IBM says about half (yes, half) of its green data center revenue is coming in from outside of the United States.  Companies in emerging markets find that power is expensive and/or there's limited access to it.  In addition, there's (to abuse the term) a green field effect in building from scratch, so it is easier for companies to incorporate new technologies from the start in South America, Eastern Europe, and parts of Asia and the Middle East.  Companies are not burdened with a lot of legacy equipment and thinking, so they can move directly to incorporating the best green practices and hardware.

    COSAN, a sugar-energy group based n San Paulo, signed a deal to get a new data center with a pair of IBM servers with virtualization and optimization in mind; IBM will also design the center with best practices for energy efficiency in mind. 

    Slovak Telekom has contracted for a new green data center in Bratislava, Slovakia.  Scheduled to come on line in 2011, the 1,200 square meter data center features a cooling system that will tap into outside air during cold months to cut down on air conditioning usage while a high-density layout for equipment will allow for partitioning of racks into hot and cold aisles for better airflow and use of cooling resources.

    IBM will work with the Indian subsidiary of the Perfetti Van Melle candy company – the firm that makes Mentos -- to design, build and manage a 1,000 squire foot green data center; it will also work with PVM India to manage desktop and network resources across the country to get energy efficiency improvements of about 17 percent. 

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