IBM drives green shipping

IBM has partnered with a Japanese manufacturing company, Omron, to bring together the companies' technologies and help streamline shipping and transportation, with an eye toward reducing costs and greenhouse gas emissions, says Greenbiz.com.

IBM brings to the partnership technologies that can plan the most efficient transportation routes for goods and Omron has developed a range of tools for traffic control, sensors and automation.

Together the companies will develop ways to help clients avoid penalties from CO2 emissions. While focusing at first primarily on Japanese clients, the new solutions fit into IBM's Smarter Planet initiative.

A survey released by the IDC Green IT Forum reveals that 68% of respondents rated energy efficiency as "top of mind" when thinking about Green IT while 51% say their organisation's approach to green was directly tied to the cost savings it could provide, says CIOL.

Vernon Turner, senior vice-president, Enterprise Infrastructure, says: "In difficult economic times, businesses are faced with rising energy costs and forced to squeeze the most amount of computer power out of valuable data centre real estate in the most efficient manner possible”.

The survey says 85% of respondents claim IT will play a medium to large role in their organisation's effort to reduce its environmental impact. However, 78% of respondents say their organisations currently have no budgets in place for green IT or corporate sustainability initiatives.

Managed hosting provider GreenSoft Solutions has released its new Matrix virtualisation platform, states The Whir.

The hardware-independent platform is built on technologies from VMware, Cisco, Dell, Network Appliance and Force 10 Networks, creating a highly available environment with minimal downtime.

The GSI Matrix platform also allows for rapid, secure, patched and pre-configured virtual machine template deployment. Matrix is also backed by a green computing platform, which uses 50% less power and cooling than traditional servers.