As reported by Jim Bourne, “IBM has patented a solution which the tech giant claims is a ‘green button’ that distributes a cloud service to lower power systems to help save environmental costs.”

From IBM’s blog:

“Our patent lets companies route their requests to under-utilized servers or datacenters, or even to servers or datacenters powered by alternative energy sources. The idea is that if companies want to reduce their environmental impact, they could sign up for this option through their cloud provider. The cloud provider’s online set up wizard that walks IT administrators through questions such as how much capacity and bandwidth is needed, would also have an ‘environmentally friendly’ option. The cloud service requests or deployments would then be flagged, indicating these services should be done with the lowest environmental impact available across the datacenter.”

This concept does not seem so novel to me.  Dynamic load management systems have been around for decades.  Perhaps what’s unique here is that they factor in power consumption, and thus the impact on the environment.  Okay…

The larger impact is that cloud providers could start thinking a bit differently about how machine instances are distributed among different data centers, with different power requirements.  That could be impactful, but also rather obvious.

I suspect that most cloud providers would leverage this technology with cost savings in mind, more so than environment considerations.  IBM may find that this is more of a PR success than a technology success.