Video: Project Big Green Can Help Small Business, Too

Steven Sams, IBM Vice President, Global Site & Facilities, a guest at an Executive News Roundtable sponsored by Energy Policy TV, said an IT energy crunch will affect small and medium-sized businesses, as well as large ones. Enterprises of all sizes will benefit from IBM’s $1 billion energy efficiency initiative, dubbed Project Big Green, Sams said. “…We see a real, emerging crisis around computing, and that crisis is centered on energy,” he said, adding that this initiative aims free capacity at local sites, add to the bottom line through energy savings and improve efforts at environmental responsibility. Complete video of Sams’ appearance is available at no cost on Energy Policy TV’s Executive News Roundtable Channel.

Energy use by IT is “skyrocketing,” as IBM’s clients will have installed six times the servers, and 69 times the storage, in 2010 compared to 2000 numbers, Sams said.

Commercial energy costs are also rising, and a data center consumes 10 to 30 times more energy than a typical office building, Sams said.

Through Project Big Green, IBM sees the potential to cut IT energy consumption 40 percent to 50 percent using existing tools and technology, Sams said.

Small and medium-sized businesses can take advantages of many aspects of Project Big Green to cut their IT energy consumption, Sams said. In particular, IBM offers scalable, modular data centers that are smaller and much more energy-efficient than typical data centers, he said.

Bryant University in Rhode Island was an early adopter of Project Big Green techniques, and it has saved 30% of its energy use, compared to its prior data-center implementation, Sams said. “They’re absolutely tickled pink with the solution,” he said.

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