NWC News Network, July 18 2008, 1700 hrs
IBM has announced the launch of the second phase of Project Big Green (PBG 2.0) in India. With this, it plans to introduce new products and services in the country to help enterprises build “greener” technology infrastructures that can meet growing business requirements while realizing rapid financial benefits from such investments. Last year, IBM had launched Project Big Green and committed $1 billion globally to deliver technologies that help clients dramatically increase the level of energy efficiency in their data centers.
With Project Big Green, IBM introduced unique offerings like Scalable Modular Data Center (SMDC) in the Indian market last year. With PBG 2.0, it is looking at further building up on the success that it has created with SMDCs and help clients make their IT greener.
According to IDC's latest report titled "Assessment of Business Opportunity for Datacenter Services in India 2008", nearly 17 percent of Indian enterprises faced 'power and cooling' as a challenge in 2007; by 2009 nearly 22 percent of enterprises are expected to face the same.
To help clients address these challenges, IBM has introduced modular, energy-efficient data center designs for the Indian market to power businesses ranging from large enterprises to small organizations. The new data centers, which can reduce energy consumption by as much as 50 percent, include Portable Modular Data Center (PMDC) which provides a fully functional data center in a pod-like form with a complete physical infrastructure including power and cooling systems and remote monitoring; Enterprise Modular Data Center (EMDC) which is an enterprise class data center “shrink-wrapped” and standardized from 5,000 sq ft up to 20,000 sq ft.; High Density Zone (HDZ) which is a modular system providing incremental cooling and power capability in existing data centers that are tapped out of capacity.
“As Indian organizations eye high growth in their business, they want to be more conscious and efficient in the manner they consume and pay for energy,” said Steve Sams, Vice-President, Global Site and Facilities Services, IBM Corporation. “With the launch of the second phase of Project Big Green, clients in India will have access to some of the most advanced green technologies and services for their data centers.”
Having built and managed nearly 300,000 sq ft of data center space in the country already, IBM is confident of further increasing its marketshare with the launch of these new and innovative datacenter solutions. IBM also announced the success it has had with Indian clients since the launch of Project Big Green. The company revealed it has signed over a dozen clients for its Scalable Modular Data Centers or SMDCs since the time it was introduced in India last year. Some of these clients are Fiat India, Bharat Bijlee, Atlas Copco, Apollo Sindhoori, APL, FINO and Religare.
Elaborating on the advantages of SMDCs, Vinod Gurnani, CIO, Bharat Bijlee, said, ““In order to keep pace with the growth that the company has been witnessing, we needed to have a data center solution that was not only energy-efficient but also scalable. With the data center solution deployed by IBM, we are confident of meeting both our current and future business needs as well as achieving significant operational efficiency."
IBM also announced a range of new products and services that would be made available to the Indian customers for helping them make their data centers green. These include energy efficient services and software to help clients with storage and virtualization needs as well as monitoring and managing of energy consumption for the data center.
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