IBM Champions Less Servers, Optimized Service for U.S. Open
Sustainable website management part of technology company’s larger green program
By Danielle Lee
As millions of tennis fans visit the U.S. Open tennis tournament website in the next two weeks to check on the fates of Venus Williams or Rafael Nadal, IBM is operating the site with 54 fewer servers than it did two years ago, in an efficiency push reflected in the company’s larger green initiatives.
In a room in the bowels of a stadium on the Flushing Meadows, Queens, N.Y., tournament site, IBM and United States Tennis Association (USTA) employees use a virtual dashboard to manage the six servers positioned in three U.S. time zones that power usopen.org, which saw 7.3 million visitors last year.
Through this P6 system, they can manage workloads by ramping down processor speeds at less-trafficked times, such as in between matches, to hit efficient “IT optimization points,” said John Kent, IBM’s Program Manager of Worldwide Sponsorship Marketing.
This system, first tested at the IBM-sponsored Wimbledon tennis tournament in June, is still being fine-tuned to find greater ways of coping with the influx of online visitors over a short time to a site without year-round infrastructure support.
In addition to the U.S. Open and Wimbledon, IBM sponsors the other two tennis grand slam tournaments, Roland Garros in France and the Australian Open, but the cumulative energy to power these websites is only part of the carbon footprint IBM strives to keep in check.
IBM must contend with outdated data centers that house the company’s computer systems—half of which were built before 1990—which means greater energy costs than the initial equipment expense and construction bill.
The company’s Project Big Green is a $1 billion a year investment that strives to “double IT capacity within the same energy footprint,” said Chris O’Connor, IBM’s Vice President of Software Strategy and Market Management.
To reach this goal, IBM introduced water as a more efficient server cooling technique and announced, as the next phase of Project Big Green, that it will investigate environmental improvements outside data centers, in networking and office environments.
IBM has published a publicly available environmental report since 1990; promotes equipment recycling programs, through which 85 percent of customer-returned technology has been refurbished; and received the U.S. EPA climate protection award twice, in 1998 and 2006.
The company also counts among these successes the reduction of the workforce’s carbon emissions by 45 percent since 1990, even as the employee base has grown to 470,000. Some 35,000 employees volunteer in an internal network to solve sustainability problems.
Tracking these numbers is important to a company that also manages statistics for the U.S. Open, transmitting a world feed of match scores to 190 countries and offering “SlamTracker” numbers on individual players and potential match-ups for fans online. IBM also provides players with customized match analysis DVDs after each competition, one of the few intensive data points not available on usopen.org.