IBM Creates Green Alliance

LOS ANGELES -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it is creating an alliance program for independent hardware and software vendors to support industry standards for new enterprise data centers, which are dramatically more energy efficient, virtualized, and resilient.

The new alliance with top IT companies around the world will enable clients to evolve to new enterprise data centers while offering the widest possible choice of open technologies.

The importance of interoperability and open standards for new enterprise data centers -- including those for energy management, virtualization, networking, security, and service management, among others -- is a focal point of this program.

For example, vendors that support energy efficiency standards can enable end-to-end management and monitoring of power and cooling of hardware in the data center. Such standards pave the way to product interoperability for greater data center efficiency by setting caps on energy use, shifting resources to meet business requirements, or adjusting workloads to avoid higher billing rates.

The alliance is targeted at independent hardware and software vendors that specialize in elements crucial to data centers, including networking, virtualization, facilities management, platforms, operating systems, storage, and systems management.The alliance will offer several benefits to vendors that join including: Increased exposure to clients through a new enterprise data center alliance portal; access to potential joint go-to-market activities; potential participation in joint-development projects; the ability to participate in IBM client events; and exposure to capabilities and opportunity for early interoperability development and tests.

The following IT vendors are in support of this program: Brocade, Citrix, Eaton, Emulex, Juniper Networks, Novell, RedHat, Sun and VMware.

"Brocade is a long term partner with IBM. We believe this new enterprise data center Alliance Program is a great opportunity to further our Data Center Fabric strategy to help IBM customers evolve their data centers," said Marty Lans, Sr. Director, Data Center Marketing, Brocade. "IBM's commitment to open standards and interoperability will be beneficial in supporting high levels of performance and end-to-end interoperability across the new enterprise data center ecosystem."

IBM Corp.