At its second annual Technical Forum, The Green Grid today announced the launch of new programs, tools and metrics and reporting guidelines designed to help data center managers worldwide improve the efficiency of their facilities and operations. The event featured a keynote by Rob Bernard, Chief Sustainability Strategist at Microsoft.
Founded in 2007, The Green Grid is a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems.
“As IT and facilities budgets receive increased scrutiny, efficiency becomes a more business critical issue for data center managers globally,” said Tom Brey, a director of The Green Grid and senior technical staff member in IBM’s systems and technology group, in a press release. “Members of The Green Grid have been working hard to develop new tools, metrics and guidelines for measuring efficiency, and we’re looking forward to receiving industry feedback at this year’s technical forum.”
Following on the introduction last year of PUE and DCiE metrics, which help end-users separate and measure their facility power consumption from their IT power consumption, The Green Grid members and industry attendees at the forum will explore different methods for measuring and reporting energy efficiency and data center productivity (DCP). Potential measurements of useful work in data centers, the Proxies for Estimating Data Center Productivity, will be actively discussed at the Technical Forum and is open for public comment.
At the forum, leaders of the organization announced plans for the new Data Center 2.0 program. This initiative will provide the industry with a multi-year set of design guides proposed for use by data center operators and designers to build and operate energy efficient data centers. The design guides will provide principles and guidelines for use in both new data center designs and or retrofits. In addition to the design guide, The Data Center 2.0 program will also include a recognition program for end-users reporting their PUE or DCiE measurements within the stated guidelines.
“The data center is comprised of highly complex systems, and while multiple technical designs and best practice documents exist within the industry, there is not a single authoritative source taking a holistic approach to data center designs and moving the data center as a whole forward,” said Jim Pappas, a director of The Green Grid and director of initiative marketing in Intel’s Server Platforms Group, in a press release. “With the Data Center 2.0 initiative, The Green Grid will spearhead the effort to create an industry accepted design guide to optimize data center efficiency.”
New Educational Tools
The Green Grid will also launch to its members “The Green Grid Academy,” a set of readily-available training materials that can help end-users better understand how to deploy industry-standard metrics and measurements into their specific facilities. This content is expected to be released publicly during the first half of 2009.
The Green Grid has also redesigned its website, making it more user-friendly, more interactive, and provides easier-to-find content. The new site includes an informational micro-site co-developed with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Save Energy Now program to help data center managers initiate and implement an energy management program.
The Green Grid also announced the release of several new white papers for public consumption:
PUE Scalability – This white paper explains how to use data collected from energy consumption to produce both statistical analyses, and introduces a new metric called PUE Scalability to better assess how well a facility’s total power consumption scales with changes in IT power consumption.
Proxies for Estimating Data Center Productivity – This paper outlines eight possible methods for measurement of useful work in the data center, and the public will have the opportunity to offer feedback on which specific method they prefer
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All of these white papers can be found at http://www.thegreengrid.org/library-and-tools.aspx.