How IBM is making the data center more energy-efficient

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>> Announcer: Steve Sams is the Vice President of Global Site and Facilities Services at IBM. His work focuses on increasing energy efficiency and reducing operational costs inside the data center.

>> Steve Sams: Data centers are energy hogs. They're basically doubling their energy consumption every five years. Currently by the way, data centers are using about 2% of the total energy on the planet; that's equivalent to all of the airline industry around the world combined. If this doubling growth rate continues, then by 2030 data centers will represent 12% of the total energy use on the planet. That's just not affordable, not achievable. One of the things we're realized is this focus on green data centers is not just about energy efficiency. It's also about overall IT efficiency; so we generally find ways to reduce energy consumption but every one of those actions usually also reduces their operational costs significantly. On average for every dollar we save on energy, we're saving four to five dollars on other operational costs. So this focus on energy efficiency, this focus on green, is really a focus on how to make your IT organization as operationally efficient as possible and it has an enormous financial impact on your company. IBM is trying to help customers in very simple ways. We're suggesting that customers really stretch the life of their existing data center. We know how to make them much more energy efficient and that defers the need for customers to build new ones. We also suggest that customers look at where they're data centers are all around the world and think about rationalizing them. Think about consolidating all their data centers into a smaller number of sites, improve their ability to manage those sites and significantly reduce their costs. And lastly, we're suggesting that if customers are building new data centers, they build it in a modular way, they build it in a just in time way; where in essence they pay for what they need today, today; and defer the cost for what they need in the future to the future. I don't think any of us expects IT to go away. IT is a huge enabler of productivity, it's a huge enabler or new intelligence and new things, it's a huge enabler of all of us including the planet becoming smarter. And then if we look at the new generation of people around the world, they're highly IT literate. They're going to use these tools, they're going to use these assets to enable new capabilities for our customers to enable them to make smarter decisions about the planet and about the businesses and about the lives we all live.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====