March 19, 2007—A new nonprofit consortium of 11 companies, including the top computer manufacturers, has been formed to advance energy efficiency in computer data centers and business computing ecosystems. The new Green Grid consortium bills itself as the first industry initiative to take a holistic view of the computing ecosystem, with a focus on addressing the pressing issues facing data center users.
According to The Green Grid, energy efficiency for data centers, which include the “server farms” that are the backbone of the Internet, is the most pressing issue facing technology providers and their customers today, partly because of exponential increases in power and cooling costs, and also because the demand for data centers is outpacing the availability of clean, reliable power in many parts of the world.
The Green Grid’s newly announced Board of Directors is comprised of AMD, APC, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Rackable Systems, SprayCool, Sun Microsystems, and VMware, which represent leadership across all facets of product development for the data center and are collectively committed to driving new user-centric metrics, technology standards, and best practices for use by data center managers worldwide, says The Green Grid.
As part of the consortium’s unveiling, The Green Grid released three white papers: one on the opportunity to increase energy efficiency, one on guidelines for efficient data centers, and one that defines two new metrics for measuring efficiency in data centers. For more information or to view the white papers, visit The Green Grid.
