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Published on August 3, 2007

In one of the most significant transformations of its worldwide data centers in a generation, IBM announced that it will consolidate about 3,900 computer servers onto about 30 System z mainframes running the Linux operating system. The company anticipates that the new server environment will consume approximately 80 percent less energy than the current set up and expects significant savings over five years in energy, software and system support costs.

At the same time, the transformation will make IBM's IT infrastructure more flexible to evolving business needs. The initiative is part of Project Big Green, a broad commitment that IBM announced in May to sharply reduce data center energy consumption for IBM and its clients.

IBM, with over 8,000,000 square feet of data center space (equivalent to 139 football fields), operates the world's largest and most sophisticated data center operations, with major locations in New York, Connecticut, Colorado, the United Kingdom, Japan and Australia. The company anticipates that the new global infrastructure, supporting over 350,000 users, will serve as a powerful example of IBM's ongoing transformation toward cutting-edge data center design for large enterprises around the world. Since 1997, IBM has consolidated its strategic worldwide data centers from 155 to seven.

IBM plans to recycle the 3,900 servers through IBM Global Asset Recovery Services.

The consolidation project capitalizes on the ability of a single mainframe to behave as hundreds or thousands of individual servers. This capability, called virtualization, which IBM pioneered on the mainframe over 40 years ago, parcels out a mainframe's system resources including processing cycles, networking, storage and memory to many virtual servers. Each virtual server functions as a real, physical machine. The migration will use only a portion of each mainframe, leaving substantial headroom for future growth.

By trading physical servers for virtual ones, IBM will be able to reduce costs along a broad front, including expenditures related to:

Energy Consumption, in replacing 3,900 servers, each with its own power supply, with 30 mainframes, IBM is expected to save enough electricity to power a small town.

Software, which often is priced on a per processor basis. IBM expects to help minimize software licensing charges as the new IBM mainframes contain significantly fewer processors than the current 3,900 servers.

System support, the project is expected to free up IBM technical personnel from system administration tasks to work on higher-value projects, including designing and building customer solutions.

The IBM mainframe's ability to run the Linux operating system is key to the consolidation project, providing an open foundation for a wide variety of applications.

IBM data centers in Poughkeepsie, New York; Southbury, Connecticut; Boulder, Colorado; Portsmouth, UK; Osaka, Japan; and Sydney, Australia, will participate in the initiative. IBM has established world-class teams to migrate, test and deploy the applications, which include: WebSphere process, portal and application servers; SAP applications; and DB2.