"The data centre energy crisis is inhibiting our clients' business growth as they seek to access computing power," said Mike Daniels, senior vice president, IBM Global Technology Services. "Many data centres have now reached full capacity, limiting a firm's ability to grow and make necessary capital investments. Today we are providing clients the IBM action plan to make their data centers fully utilised and energy efficient."

The company expects to be able to double the computing capacity of its data centres without increasing power consumption or carbon footprint, a projected saving of more than five billion kilowatt hours per year.

IBM will offer its customers a five-step program to improved energy efficiency:

1. Diagnose existing facilities, including the use of thermal sensors to identify hot spots and air leakage;
2. Build or update the data centre to be more energy efficient, possibly using the preconfigured IBM Scalable Modular Data Center;
3. Virtualise infrastructure to improve utilisation while taking advantage of technologies such as blade servers and Cell processors for selected tasks;
4. Manage power consumption automatically putting servers on standby when they aren't needed (this ties in with virtualisation, which allows workloads to be reallocated to different physical servers as necessary); and
5. Cool equipment more efficiently through liquid cooling systems.

"Just as IBM helped organisations grapple with new innovations around the Internet and Linux, we will again assist clients navigate this new era of energy efficient computing," said Bill Zeitler, senior vice president, IBM Systems and Technology Group. "Relief from the energy crisis can't be achieved through incremental improvements.  Bold ideas and actionable plans are needed to deal with this issue."