The move is being seen as the biggest restructuring of IBM's worldwide data centers in the last few decades.
IBM expects to save more than $250 million in energy, software and support systems costs over 5 years through this restructuring exercise. According to the servers major, the new server environment will consume 80% less energy resulting in the stated cost savings.
The transformation, which is a part of the Project Big Green, will also make its infrastructure more agile and responsive to changes in customer preferences and technology needs, expects IBM.
IBM had announced Project Big Green, earlier in May this year aimed at sharply reducing data center energy consumption for IBM and its clients.
IBM has over 8,000,000 square feet of data center space including major locations such as New York, Connecticut, Colorado, the United Kingdom, Japan and Australia.
The new global infrastructure will support over 350,000 users, serving as a powerful example of cutting-edge data center design for large enterprises around the world, according to IBM.
During the exercise, the 3,900 servers will be recycled by IBM Global Asset Recovery Services.
IBM's mainframe business has consistently delivered posting five consecutive quarters of revenue growth. In 2006, mainframe revenue outgrew platforms based on the Microsoft Windows operating system, according to IDC.
The consolidation project relies on the capacity of a single mainframe to behave as hundreds or thousands of individual servers. IBM was the first to develop this capability on mainframes over 40 years ago.
Under this concept, a mainframe's system resources, including processing cycles, networking, storage and memory are distributed among many "virtual" servers. Each virtual server functions as a real, physical machine.
The migration uses only a portion of each mainframe, leaving potential for future computing needs.
By trading physical servers for virtual ones, IBM will be able to dramatically reduce costs and energy consumption.
