IBM Seeks Market Advantage for New Mainframe in Electrical Crisis
Soon after the California electricity shortage hit the front pages, light bulbs went on in some minds at International Business Machines Corp., the premier maker of big, powerful mainframe computers.
IBM already had been telling potential customers that a mainframe computer could replace a vast “farm” of server computers that drive corporate Web sites and process transactions.
Now, the world’s No. 1 computer maker is stressing another point in its marketing: energy savings.
The company has started promoting its new z900 mainframe as the cost-effective antidote to power-hungry “server farms” and aims to take sales from the server leader, Sun Microsystems Inc. Another mainframe maker, Unisys Corp., asked its engineers to crunch some numbers and also found substantial power savings.
The cost of energy “wasn’t a real significant part of the buying decision, but it will be in the future, especially in California,” said Richard Ptak, a vice president at the Hurwitz Group Inc. consultancy.
Ptak, who has consulted both for Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM and for Sun, compared one IBM z900 to 500 Sun UE250 servers. He found that the IBM, which can do as much work as the Sun devices put together, would use less than $12,000 a year worth of power, including air conditioning. The Suns would consume 17 times more electricity, or $205,000.
“Over time, it’s going to resonate more as energy prices rise,”’ said Rich Lechner, an IBM vice president who handles z900 marketing.
Sun Responds
A Sun spokeswoman, Diane Carlini, declined to comment on the energy-saving comparison. She said IBM was trying to “leverage” the California crisis, in which the state’s two biggest power utilities totter near bankruptcy because they’ve been unable to recoup billions of dollars from consumers for electricity bought from producers.
“Sun always has been and will continue to be energy efficient” in its products and corporate power usage, she said.
Metahost.net Technologies Inc., which provides computing services to companies, installed an IBM mainframe five months ago that is partitioned into hundreds of virtual servers for clients to run remotely.
“The cost savings are huge, not only on the electricity but on the space,” said Jag Sandhu, the Vancouver, B.C.-based company’s chief development officer.
Real estate cost was a key factor for Metahost, Sandhu said, because the company needed to remain close to Vancouver’s fast link to the Internet, which was downtown.
Good timing, plus the emergence of several key trends in computing, may make energy savings a credible selling point for IBM and other mainframe makers.
“Server farms became a solution because everybody wanted their own server, with their own security,” Ptak said.
Silicon Valley Power, the utility for Santa Clara, has said that server farms account for 80% of the power requested by new customers.
Peak Demand
Servers manage common files and functions on a network of PCs, and they handle such tasks as delivering Web pages.
Booming growth of the Web has increased computing demand so much that some companies need banks and rows of servers, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, to handle peak usage.
At the same time, hardware upgrades, the maturation of the Linux operating system and new software pricing methods have let mainframes work like an entire “farm” in a single box.
The z900, which typically costs about $1.5 million, can be partitioned into hundreds of virtual servers, each assigned discrete computing tasks.
Mainframes closely integrate hardware and software to handle simultaneous programs and can process millions of transactions daily; only supercomputers are faster.
Unisys Sees Savings
Like IBM, Blue Bell, Penn.-based Unisys sees potential in using energy savings to promote its ES7000 computer.
Unisys engineers recently found that a single top-of-the-line ES7000 uses 43% less power than 15 of the company’s own mid-range servers.
As the company promotes the consolidation of server farms, energy “could become a bigger factor than it is today,” said Unisys spokesman Marty Krempasky.
An East Coast telecommunications company that installed an IBM mainframe last year to take the place of 750 smaller Sun servers discovered that it had cut direct power usage by more than 90%, said David Boyes, a computer systems designer who is a consultant to the company.
Moreover, as the company cuts floor space while dropping servers at a rate of about 10 to 15 a month, it can reduce both real estate and heating and air-conditioning costs further, Boyes said.
The company’s two types of Sun servers used 1.8 or 4.1 kilowatts of power apiece, and the IBM mainframe and its accompanying storage server used a total of 10.1 kilowatts, Boyes said.
A kilowatt is enough energy to light an average U.S. home.
