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IBM to build $360m flagship green data centre

Tony Chan | August 6, 2008 | 0 Comments

Big Blue, and now Big Green, IBM, has unveiled plans to build a US$360 million data centre at its facility in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. The company will renovate an existing building at the site to create “one of the most technologically advanced and energy efficient data centres in the world.”

“The new data center will be the first in the world to be built with IBM’s New Enterprise Data Center design principles,” the company said. “Clients using this center will have unparalleled access to massive internet-scale computing capabilities, while gaining the cost and environmental protection advantages of IBM’s industry-leading energy efficiency data center design.”

The new facility is the second green data centres announced by IBM. In June, the company announced that it opened its [then]“greenest” data centre, a 115,000 sq. ft facility, in Boulder, Colorado as part of a US$350 million investment at that site.
The new site in North Carolina will feature many of the technologies from IBM’s Project Green initiative.

“What we are doing is aggregating technology from around the world to build the most advanced data centre, the most environmentally friendly data centre that has ever been,” said Bob Greenberg, IBM North Carolina senior state executive. “This data centre provides the technological leadership to be as green as you can possibly be. It becomes the showcase and its going to be right here in North Carolina.”

The new site will be designed according to IBM’s modular data centre design, allowing the company to expand capacity as customers sign on to the site. IBM will also introduce its High Density Zone solution, which will support IBM’s latest water-cooled equipment.

As part of the announcement, IBM has set a goal to reuse 95% of the original building’s shell, recycling 90% of the materials from the original building and making sure that 20% of the newly purchased material is from recycled sources.

The new centre will also feature high density computing systems paired with virtualization technology, which when deployed together with the company’s Cool Blue technologies and modular design, now offer clients up to three times more computing capacity per square foot than the average data centre, according to the company.

Other features include the ability to use free cooling during cooler months, a mechanical system design that is 50% more efficient than the industry average, and the use of alternative energy with a target to reduce up to 1 million pounds of emissions per year.

The new facility will also feature dual-site backup and recovery with the earlier Boulder site.

CLOUD COMPUTING
One of the key objectives of the new facility is the delivery of Cloud Computing capabilities to customers. The site will be part of a US$400 million cloud computing initiative being rolled out in the US and Japan. The company announced that it is building a cloud computing centre in Tokyo, which will linked to the new North Carolina site, as well as a network of seven other IBM cloud centres around the world.

As reported in CommsDay earlier, HP, Intel and Yahoo have announced a cloud computing test bed linking six ‘centres of excellence” at Singapore’s IDA facilities, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Steinbuch Centre for Computing of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, HP Labs, Intel Research and Yahoo!.

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