IBM Combines the power of the sun, the cooling ability of water and the use of high-voltage direct current (HVDC)
IBM has built a highly energy-efficient mainframe that could portend future data centers that consume far less power. IBM has deployed these technologies with its latest generation zEC12 mainframe system that is being run on solar power, water cooling and HVDC technologies – completely off the electric grid.
With the exponential increase in data being generated through growing mobile usage, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things, data center energy consumption is increasing rapidly and efficiency is at a premium. Data centers require energy in order to organize, process and store these huge amounts of data on large computing systems and also keep them at operating temperature, especially under stressful climate conditions. With some data centers consuming power in the range of hundreds of megawatts, the net power consumption of data centers across the world is now in the range of hundreds of Gigawatts and growing.
“We are constantly exploring ways in which we can make our data centers more energy efficient and help reduce the electric cost. We have created the first highly energy efficient data center by integrating solar energy together with water cooling and HVDC solutions. This integration has opened up new possibilities in the area of energy efficiencies and is the latest investments made at the India lab to design an efficient and smarter data center,” said SandeshBhat, VP, India Software Labs, IBM India/South Asia.
IBM has already been using solar energy to power its Bangalore data center since 2011. Engineers at IBM India have now integrated solar energy together with water cooling and HVDC solutions to create the first highly energy-efficient data center.
“We have been working to make our data centers less energy “hungry” and adapt more green technologies,” said Arvind Krishna, General Manager of development & manufacturing at IBM. “As we have added each piece of the energy-savings puzzle — integrating solar energy, water cooling and HVDC — we now see a set of technologies that could completely transform the way data centers are designed.”
