For now, the consortium will continue to focus on the data center.
SAN FRANCISCO
- Going green means looking at desktops, too.
Most of the work of the Green Grid until now has focused on creating standards to measure power consumption
in the data center, but while proposing methods for creating more energy-efficient
environments, members of the consortium say they are also discussing ways to
address the power consumption and problems associated with PCs.
The Green Grid held its first ever
Technical
Forum and members' meeting here and announced several new
"deliverables," including reports on best practices and practical steps
enterprises can take to develop and plan energy-efficient data centers.
During the two-day conference, most of the talk focused on the data center.
But members also agreed to address some of the concerns about the
power consumption of enterprise desktops and notebooks. The group's charter
addresses all forms of enterprise computing and, as the consortium picks up
steam, PCs could play a bigger role in its future agenda.
"Servers are managed as an entity, and so it's easier to adopt new
technology or new best practices efforts, and that's one of the reasons why the
Green Grid has focused its efforts for far on servers," said Jon Haas, who
works with Intel's Eco-Technology Program Office.
One way the Green Grid is keeping an eye on what is going on with desktops
is watching what other organizations, such as the
Climate
Savers Computing Initiative, are doing. These organizations are
specifically focused on the power consumption of PCs. The members of Climate
Savers are studying way to create more energy-efficient computers,
components and power management tools.
"An organization like the Green Grid is looking at the data center
holistically, while Climate Savors is specifically looking at the box and
moving outward from there," Haas said. "Their [Climate Savers] focus initially
has been on power supplies and motherboard efficiencies. I would expect that we
would expect some synergies across both organizations for developing
methodologies."
Learn more here about the Green Grid.
Tony Pierce, a technical evangelist with Microsoft, said that many of the
issues the Green Grid is working on, such as methodologies and standards, have
already been adopted by PC vendors. One example is the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency's Energy Star rating that is applied to desktops and
notebooks.
The EPA is now working a similar Energy Star rating for servers.
"Clients, to a certain degree, are ahead of the game," Pierce said. "You
have the Energy Star 4.0 rating, but with data centers, you don't have a
standard way to measure how much energy they use. You have to find that out
first before you can improve it."
Larry Vertal, who works in Advanced Micro Device's Global Corporate
Marketing division, said the Green Grid is still working to get feedback from
its membership. He added that the fact that Intel and
AMD,
both fierce rivals, have come together to create standards for the data center
will also lend credibility to the efforts of other organizations such as
Climate Savers.
AMD and Intel are members of both the
Green Grid and Climate Savers.
"There is a belief that ... working together and gathering input from all
businesses will have a real impact on people using all types of computing
equipment," Vertal said.
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