While environmental concerns are constantly creeping-up the IT agenda, cost concerns remain firmly on top of that list. The two intersect when it comes to power use in data centres, and that’s where a new industry consortium looks to make a difference.
Launched in February, The Green Grid aims to bring together parties from across the industry and from within the user community to take a closer look at how energy issues are impacting data centres and how organizations can make their IT deployments more energy efficient.
Rick Schuckle, a Green Grid board member, says the group intends to spur energy-efficiency in everything from micro¬processors and servers to cooling systems and systems management. Initially, it will offer users a package of best practices, such as ways to find “stranded capacity” within a company’s operations.
The group is also in the process of developing global standards to help organizations address power management issues, and has launched a power distribution options study, due by year’s end, which is investigating seven alternatives to traditional alternating current (AC) power.
The Green Grid also developed power usage effectiveness (PUE), a measurement that aims to measure data centre power efficiency by dividing your total facility power by IT equipment power.
“We are 100 per cent focused on the energy efficiency piece of data centres,” said Schuckle. We’ve brought together industry leaders along with end users. If you look at it from a vendor’s standpoint, we’ve got silicon suppliers like Intel and AMD, and you’ve got hardware suppliers such as IBM and HP. You have software suppliers in VM Ware and Microsoft (and) the power and cooling folks like APC and SprayCool.”