Going by the increasingly high consumption of power by data centres, this was a long time coming.

According to a report on EconomicTimes.com, Big Blue's software lab in Bengaluru is in the process of making the new system commercially available to firms running large data centres.

The first implementation, being done at the lab itself, uses a solar power array spread over more than 6,000 sq ft on the rooftop of the lab. The report quotes IBM India chief scientist Kota Murali as saying that the installation is capable of providing 50-kilowatt of electricity for up to 330 days a year, for an average of five hours a day.

The advantage of solar power is that it is DC (direct current), unlike grid power that is AC (alternating current). This is especially useful in computing, wherein processors run on DC. So the regular supply from the grid needs to be first converted to DC in a data centre. This conversion, as per the report, results in a loss of 13 per cent of power - whereas the DC to DC conversion (which apparently is still needed) the loss is just 4 per cent.

Now, how many of Indian data centres send queries to IBM is what will be interesting to discover.