With New York City having experienced sweltering heat and power outages this summer, IBM virtualization and self-managing autonomic technology -- which helps improve utilization of technology systems and help reduce energy consumption -- will power the 126th annual US Open tennis tournament, allowing millions of fans worldwide to experience every point, regardless of the weather.

Virtualization technology, which IBM has been providing to clients since before Arthur Ashe won his first US Open title in 1968, allows many computing resources to act as one and, more commonly, one computer, storage device or server to divide its own workload and act as many different resources. By reducing the number of computers and servers in use, virtualization helps minimize the often strenuous and expensive power and cooling demands of datacenters and eliminate unnecessary maintenance expenses.

In the virtualized environment, IBM's self-managing autonomic technology acts as a safety net by identifying and resolving problems before they happen. For instance, if power at one datacenter site is interrupted for any reason, autonomic technology automatically redirects services to another location so systems stay up and running. As the costs to power and cool datacenters climb to become one of the predominant costs of running a datacenter, IBM Virtualization Engine offerings are helping clients consolidate the number of systems needed and help increase efficiency while decreasing power consumption and heat output.

"High temperatures and the resulting drain on electricity supplies as people use fans and air-conditioners to beat the heat have left places, including parts of Queens, powerless for extended periods of time this summer," said Rich Lechner, vice president, IBM virtualization. "IBM's virtualization technology is a 'green' technology. The energy-efficient, consolidated workloads allow IT managers to stay 'cool' and require less power as well as administrative effort to accomplish more."

For this year's US Open, IBM consolidated the existing infrastructure from 60 servers down to just nine. IBM Virtualization Engine technology used in the solution includes multiple partitions on the new IBM System p, the world's fastest and most energy efficient UNIX server, the "all-in-one" IBM System i, an integrated platform that securely houses more resources to save energy, and the highly energy efficient IBM BladeCenter. By consolidating systems, the new datacenter infrastructure is designed to reduce energy consumption, power and cooling needs. Additionally, IBM's enterprise workload manager (EWLM) has self-managing capabilities to automatically oversee, evaluate and handle workload demands based on business priority, recent access trends and requested resources, to allow the US Open to better manage its website system resources while reducing access and usage bottlenecks.