“Project Big Green” has been launched in India by IBM, as part of the global Intelligent Energy campaign, aimed at helping economies cope with the existing and impending energy crisis.

The project includes new products and services for IBM and its clients to reduce data centre energy consumption, transforming the world’s business and public technology infrastructures into green data centres.

As part of this initiative, IBM will create a global green team of over 1000 energy efficiency specialists from across the company, to offer green solutions comprising IBM hardware, software, services, research, and finance offerings.

According to Steven Sams, vice president - Site & Facilities Services, IBM said, “Businesses around the world are consuming over 100 billion kilowatts per year globally - furthering today's energy crisis. In 2007, there will be $10 billion spent on data centre energy worldwide, and IDC predicts that power and cooling spend in the data centre will grow at eight times the rate of hardware spend."

“According to Morgan Stanley, energy used to power and cool today’s data centres represents 44% of a data center’s total cost of ownership – and for a company of any size today, this can be a huge saving, besides it being a great contribution towards protecting the environment.” he added.