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Move to a Mainframe, Earn Carbon Credits

Posted by Zonk on from the trade-and-process-process-and-trade dept.

BBCWatcher writes "As Slashdot reported previously, 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?"

2 of 316 comments (clear)

  1. carbon credit nonsense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I'm as liberal as they come but this carbon credit nonsense has to stop.

    You either do something to be more efficient and earth-friendly or you don't.

    Carbon credits allows the rich to keep doing whatever they want while preaching to others to live more conservatively.

    Here's a thought, focus on the worst pollution areas of the world like China and reduce air travel by half - why do people fly so much if it's such a hassle to fly, especially to/from/within the USA?

  2. I/O-savvy? by Simon80 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Why do I feel like I'm reading an advertisement?