Green Grid to deliver more studies by year's end

Techworld.com - The Green Grid has laid out its road map for the rest of the year and announced that it will provide nine more studies in the next four months.

The Green Grid is a nonprofit organization looking at data center power and efficiency. Its goal is to help reduce the overall consumption of power in data centers worldwide. The Green Grid has said that it plans to provide metrics for this effort. The group was formed by Advanced Micro Devices Inc., American Power Conversion Corp., Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., Rackable Systems Inc., SprayCool Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and VMware.

Membership has grown fast, with more than 80 current members, up from 11 founding companies. Pacific Gas & Electric Co. is the latest addition and the first utility company to join. It intends to use the Green Grid's efficiency standards to expand its financial incentive programs for customers who buy energy-efficient servers, data storage devices, routers and other computing equipment.

The Green Grid has three papers on its Web site: "The Green Grid Opportunity," "Guidelines for Efficient Data Centers" and one on data center efficiency metrics. This week, the organization provided a webcast in which it outlined its current activities and road map.

It divides its work into data collection, data assessment and technology proposals. In the data collection area, the Green Grid will deliver an update on data center power-efficiency metrics and a standards and metrics inventory. Both will arrive in the third quarter of this year. It will also produce a study of how to actually collect power-efficiency data that is due in the fourth quarter.

Under the data-assessment banner, the Green Grid plans to produce four publications: a baseline market study of data center efficiency, a study of operational best practices and a database for data center performance. It will also produce a return-on-investment analysis for a green data center. The market study will be available in the third quarter, with the other three arriving in the fourth quarter.

The technology proposals will be kicked off by a report about power-distribution options, such as moving to direct current power supply, followed by a cooling options study and an initial technology road map for the next five years. For the power distribution work, it will examine a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study on DC power.

Lawrence Lamers, Green Grid director, pointed out that "despite the fact that power consumption is one of the most important issues facing IT today, there is a lack ofguidelines and resources available for those looking to drive a change." The Green Grid wants to help both existing and new data centers improve their energy efficiency, he said.