IBM’s Billion-Dollar Energy Pledge Highlights Data Explosion Danger

…IBM has vowed that its new green investments will help tackle this problem by doubling “the computing capacity of its data centers within the next three years without increasing power consumption or its carbon footprint.” Compared to simply doubling the size of its data center real estate IBM calculates that the initiative will save over five billion kilowatt hours of energy per year.

However, this target, while admirable, also serves to highlight the sheer scale of the challenge the IT sector faces in trying to limit its environmental impact.


In terms of carbon emissions IBM is spending a $1bn a year to stand still. To simply ensure its data centers’ emissions do not continue to rise as demand for computing capacity rises the company is having to embark on a massive infrastructure overhaul involving over 850 staff and countless new technologies.

Moreover, despite all the new energy efficient systems IBM and others are now deploying there are no guarantees that IT’s carbon footprint is not going to get worse.

At the heart of this environmental crisis lies a perennial IT challenge: the data explosion. There are countless studies suggesting that the amount of data that needs to be stored pretty much doubles every year and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that as data breeds more data that rate is quickening. According to one study released last year [PDF] by IBM itself the amount of digital information in the world will double every 11 hours by 2010.

Greener Computing