IBM is undertaking the biggest server consolidation project in the history of IT.

The tech giant has set an ambitious goal of doubling its server and storage capacity for operations and outsourced customers within the next three years, without increasing its energy consumption, fiscal footprint or carbon emissions.

IBM vice president of IT optimization, Rich Lechner, said IBM stands to save more than $400 million in total operational costs within five years, including investments in new equipment and migration costs.

"We evaluated over 10,000 Intel and Unix servers across our data centres to see which ones made sense to consolidate onto Linux on the mainframe and we identified 3900," Lechner said.

"We are migrating applications from the old architecture to Linux on the mainframe, and are consolidating them

"Over the last 15 years, we have reduced our carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent at a corporate level, through more efficient manufacturing techniques, data centres and work-at-home [staff]." He said the company will drop its emissions by a further 12 percent over the next five years.

Lechner said the project is "the largest sever consolidation project ever undertaken in the industry" and will save some $25 million in energy costs over the same five year period, equating to 5 billion kilowatt-hours over three years, or the equivalent power consumed by Paris in one year or 320,000 United States homes in Winter.

Unix and Linux was chosen over a Wintel platform because of higher utilization rates using server virtualization.

"X86 utilization of servers is about 5 to 10 percent, [but while] it can rise to 20 to 25 percent with server virtualization using Xen, VMware or Microsoft Virtual Server, it can be as high as as 60 to 80 percent on midrange mainframes," he said.

IBM will invest more than $1 billion a year in research and development and will appoint a "green army" of 850 IT architects and sales staff to educate customers on how to turn green using consolidation and virtualization at a system and data centre level.

Lechner said business can reduce power consumption and carbon emissions in the data centre by 40 percent by redesigning building architectures to be more efficient, and using virtualization and consolidation. He said the best servers to consolidate can be identified by examining service level agreements and work flows.

"Only 45 percent of power directed into data centres ends up with IT equipment, the rest going into lighting, chillers, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) units and UPS (un-interruptible power supply) units," he said.

"The average utilization of storage is about 25 percent, [however] customers using storage virtualization can increase their utilization by 40 points, such as from 20 to 60 percent"