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Move to a Mainframe, Earn Carbon Credits

Congress is pushing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop energy efficiency measures for data centers, especially servers. But IBM is impatient: Computerworld notes IBM has signed up Neuwing Energy Ventures, a company trading in energy efficiency certificates, in a first for “green” computing. Now if your company consolidates, say, X86 servers onto an IBM mainframe on top of slashing about 85% off your electric bill each megawatt-hour saved earns one certificate. Then you can sell the certificates in emerging carbon trading markets. IBM’s own consolidation project (collapsing 3,900 distributed servers onto 30 mainframes) will net certificates worth between $300K and $1M, depending on carbon’s market price. Will ubiquitous carbon trading discourage energy-inefficient, distributed-style infrastructure in favor of highly virtualized and I/O-savvy environments, particularly mainframes?”