brockmann_green1IBM's gone green. Well, actually big blue is going green. In an announcement released today, August 2, 2007 IBM announced its plan to reduce IT costs by 40% through the savings of $250 million in energy, hardware and services by consolidating thousands of servers into 30 system Z computers. 

This consolidated environment will use 80% less energy, reduce floorspace requirements (thousands of servers sitting in ~ 1000 racks in raised floor air-conditioned data centers) and otherwise improve the effectiveness of IBM's own internal computing services in support of its business. IT consolidation is something that IBM has been big about for some time. They've been consolidating IT leadership and many other services for the past decade:

 Feature 1997 2007
CIOs 128 1
Host data centers 155 7
Web hosting centers  80 5
Network 31 1
Applications 15,000 4,700