I just had a pleasant and thought provoking conversation with IBM’s VP of Deep Computing, David Turek, regarding IBM’s energy efficiency supercomputers press release.

"Modern supercomputers can no longer focus only on raw performance," said David Turek, vice president, deep computing, IBM. "To be commercially viable these systems most also be energy efficient. IBM has a rich history of innovation that has significantly increased energy efficiency of our systems at all levels of the system that are designed to simultaneously reduce data center costs and energy use."

There are many things Dave and I discussed. One of the areas is the role of procurement, realizing the impacts and issues of energy cost.

Procurement is the acquisition of goods and/or services at the best possible total cost of ownership, in the right quality and quantity, at the right time, in the right place and from the right source for the direct benefit or use of corporations, individuals, or even governments, generally via a contract.

IBM’s blue gene group has a paper on TCO to help procurement groups see how energy costs effect TCO.

Now ask yourself how many procurement people know how energy costs effect the TCO of data center services?

Unfortunately, training the whole procurement staff to learn the impact of energy is an impossible task. The answer to this is to add data center impact modeling software/tools to the procurement process, calculating TCO including energy costs.

Think about the roles of procurement as you green your data center. I bet none of you have, but hopefully now you will.