Template:The Green Grid

From Lauraibm

Full Article: The Green Grid shrugs off Gartner's criticisms and announces plans (14-Aug-07)

The Green Grid says it will unveil a technical roadmap later this year adding it is dedicated to finding meaningful end user methods as a means of improving performance while promoting the adoption of energy efficient technologies.

The Green Grid, announced last February, is a USA-based non-profit consortium with more than 80 members. It has an 11-person governing committee with members from AMD, Intel, Sun, IBM and Microsoft.

The organization also has four working groups aimed at developing processes and metrics for making data centres more efficient in the way they use energy for power and cooling.

Prior to The Green Grid's formation, there were no standards for data centre managers to accurately measure energy efficiency.

After compiling the required data, the group would then provide IT managers and data centres with a means of assessing what their power consumption levels are as well as provide future guidance on data centre design.

In addition to the "Data Center Efficiency Baseline Market Study", three more studies would emerge in 3Q07, officials said:

• A "Data Center Standards and Metrics Inventory" to document existing standards and metrics for energy efficiency, identify coverage gaps and make recommendations for future development,
• "The Green Grid Metrics: Describing Data Center Power Efficiency" would update the group's existing study on data center efficiency metrics and would look at workload classification through a data center segmentation model, and
• a "Power Distribution Options for the Data Center Study."

By 4Q07, officials said The Green Grid would publish three additional reports:

• "Operational Best Practices" (focusing on right-sizing the data centre and outlining best practices in the adoption of virtualization and consolidation technologies),
• "Database for Data Center Performance" (development work on a database focused on data center characteristics and performance schema), and
• a "Cooling Options Study" (focused on the qualitative advantages and disadvantages of data center cooling architectures).

Gartner recently criticized the consortium in a report, suggesting The Green Grid misses a greater opportunity to influence legislation and industry behaviour. Gartner also said that member self-interest could prevent the group from delivering any tangible standards.

• The Green Grid needs more user organizations to be members to balance the strong vendor membership, and
• vendors would develop proprietary technologies to enhance their 'greenness' and won't want to share these with other members, limiting the effectiveness of the group.
• The report also stated "The Green Grid has the potential to deliver some new standards that will benefit the industry, but don't hold your breath."