IT Carbon Strategy Assessment Service From IBM Helping Their Clients Go Green

IBM has announced a new service, the IT Carbon Strategy Study, 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 center.

"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 center and the distributed environment including offices, retail stores, and warehouses.

While early momentum has been in the greening of data centers, studies are revealing that there is at least as much emission reduction potential in the distributed environment. As few companies have existing infrastructure that has been built with energy efficiency as part of the design criteria, 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 center), 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.

More information on the IT Carbon Strategy Study is available at www.ibm.com/services/itsaconsulting.