Newsletter // GreenerComputing News :: IBM's Super-Green Supercomputers, the Greening of MS Office, and more

Technology users and leaders are often leery about the actions of the federal government, believing that many governments action inevitably reduce the level of innovation, which is, after all, the lifeblood of technology.

So it's no surprise that a little while back, Mike Manos, senior vice president of technical services at Digital Realty Trust, and formerly the general manager of Microsoft's datacenter division, warned that the feds were on track to manhandle your data center by imposing green restrictions on it.

But as I write in my blog, "Will the Feds Manhandle Your Data Center?" Manos was on the wrong track. Don't expect the federal government to issue strict green regulations having to do with data centers. The current administration is quite technology-savvy --- you only need to look at Obama's appointment of Steven Chu to be Secretary of Energy. Chu was recently the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, whose work was heavily dependent on its data center. He did great work related to Green IT when at the labs. He'll make sure that data centers aren't hamstrung with unnecessary regulation.

Here's one reason why the feds won't have to step in to make data centers more energy efficient -- private industry is already doing it. After all, there are very big incentives for data centers to go green -- millions of dollars of them. A green data center is one that costs less to operate.

One example is supercomputer operations. The big iron of the computing world have in the past been extremely expensive to run because of the enormous amount of electricity and cooling they use. But that's no longer necessarily the case.

IBM has been a pioneer in greening supercomputers, as I write in "Big Blue Goes Big Green: IBM Tops Greenest Supercomputers." IBM has a whopping 18 of the world's greenest supercomputers. And green doesn't mean not powerful -- the most powerful supercomputer in the world is also the world's fourth greenest. For details, check out my blog.

This report from the Climate Group finds that scaling up energy efficiency and renewable energy while avoiding deforestation can dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the short term, and are much-needed steps to achieve global climate goals.

These three books by Alan Calder -- The Green Agenda, The Green Office, and Compliance for Green IT -- offer a one-stop shop for how and why to make your IT operations more environmentally friendly and energy efficient.

In this 50-minute session, four experts will discuss their companies' journeys toward sustainability using data analytics, modeling and a whole- systems approach. They will address the benefits of increasing efficiencies to save costs, improve performance and meet environmental targets using IBM Green SigmaTM, a proven methodology for delivering value to key stakeholders while driving out waste and inefficiencies. And they will discuss how they have joined with other sustainability- focused companies to form the Green Sigma™ Coalition and bring this successful methodology to others.