Group Aims to Set Data Center Power Standards

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Green Grid, a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers, will unveil four project "deliverables" during its first public Technical Forum and Members' Meeting here Feb. 5-6.

The consortium, launched one year ago and now sporting some 150 members, aims to deliver "strategies, methodologies and process recommendations" to provide IT managers with new frameworks to assess data center energy use in order to gain greater efficiencies, a spokesperson said.

John Tucillo, a director of the nonprofit group, told a teleconference audience Feb. 4 that the organization has "three main goals: definitions, development and promoting/sharing what they [members] develop."

The four deliverables that will be released Feb. 5 are: a white paper on organization barriers to more efficient and lower-power data centers; reports on commonly used practices on saving power in the data center; on power distribution in the data center -- playing off a 2006 Lawrence Berkeley Labs study; and on five ways to save power immediately.

This frameworks developed by the Green Grid are designed to educate data center administrators on data center productivity, provide them with a better understanding of the key factors driving energy consumption and encourage them to reduce energy use in their data centers. 

During the forum, Green Grid members will discuss the future direction of energy-efficient data centers while previewing projects-in-progress, which include a data center rating system and ways to measure data center productivity.

That entails the consortium's progress in developing metrics for data centers that relate useful work performed within data centers to the resources required to complete that work.

For more information about The Green Grid Technical Forum, go here.