IBM went all-out green today at a press and analyst event in NYC to kick off Project Big Green. This included signage with a green logo and marketing materials featuring the IBM IT guy with a CFL bulb hovering over his head. Also, perhaps as a sign of their reduced carbon footprint ways, the event was held in the cozy, 140-seat Helen Mills Theater rather than in the comparatively lavish venues of the past like the St. Regis and Mandarin Oriental.

While my article touched mainly on the technological highlights, there were other interesting aspects to be gleaned from this marketing exercise. A lot of it, though, is familiar to anyone that explored the eco-friendly areas of IBM's website.

For starters, the company is planning to spend $1 billion a year on its energy efficiency initiatives across the corporation -- a big dollar figure to be sure, but then IBM is a HUGE multinational that generates billions in profit. Aside from that, there were some nice innovations like Donna Dillenger's stroll through a virtual data center in Second Life.

In a preview of how IBM plans to use virtual worlds to model energy efficient data centers, Dillenger, a researcher and chief IT optimization architect for IBM, guided her avatar through this 3D representation to interactively explore the how much power all that equipment consumes. A cute touch, but there were other concrete ways to drive down power utilization like the Heat eXchanger, which cools racks in a more direct manner than having to keep the entire room chilled, and the Stored Cooling product that cools a data center by employing cheaper off-peak power.

You can catch more with Clint Boulton's coverage at InternetNews. The Big Green area of IBM's site can be found here.

[Image courtesy of IBM.com]