The Green Machine - Mainframe is more Eco-Friendly

Nowadays the environment and global warming are topics of conversation not just in the coffee shop and bars, but also in the boardrooms of every comapny. Not addressing our over consumption of energy is not an option, from both moral and hard economic standpoints. Given that, then it is interesting to see the facts on Mainframe energy consumption against its competitors i.e distributed systems. Mark Anzani, vice president of System z hardware products at IBM is puts forward a compelling Green argument for mainframes in the article Are Mainframes Going Green (from IT Week Green Business News)

To quote one part of that article:
When you hit a certain workload the larger servers or mainframe environments are more energy efficient on an [energy used per] unit of work basis than multiple servers working together. We took a look at the energy used for the same workload when run on distributed four-way Unix servers and on a z9 mainframe machine. The energy consumption of the z9 was ten times less.

Now this is big talk - a 90% reduction in energy consumption ! this could become an increasingly big persuader in the mainframe versus distributed fight, and with mainframe virtualisation becoming a realistic strategy for many it could be the extra incentive to go way.

Remember - Ethical and Envronmental concerns are now big factors in share price and profitablity. Consumers are more and more aware of the issues and voting with their pocket. If you have followed Ethical Managed Funds, as I have, in the past few years you will have seen that many have outperformed the main indexes. They are no longer the marginal haven for the moral minority but are mainstream big hitters. I came across this Ethical Investment site the other day, and it'll point you in the right dfirection if you want more on this key subject