A group of technology industry leaders have announced their intent to form The Green Grid to help reduce growing power and cooling demands in enterprise data centers. AMD, HP, Sun Microsystems and IBM represent the founding sponsors of The Green Grid, an open, global organization whose goals are supported by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Alliance to Save Energy. Members of The Green Grid seek to decrease the data center and other IT facility energy usage patterns by defining and propagating best practices in data center operation, as well as construction and design.
The Green Grid is intended to serve as an interactive resource for IT professionals; a forum for sharing proven practices in data center energy management as well as working with other organizations to identify new industry-standards and metrics related to energy. As an independent, non-profit association, The Green Grid is open to any and all IT industry professionals with an interest in addressing global energy consumption issues, particularly data center managers and IT operations executives. Founding membership is also open to companies such as ISVs, IHVs, systems integrators and VARs, analyst firms, utility companies and anyone else concerned about energy efficiency issues in the enterprise.
Members are welcome to participate by registering online at www.TheGreenGrid.org, an independently hosted site where they will share best practices, discuss challenges, and define solutions to the increasing energy demands from IT. The role of the sponsors will be to help enable and fund the member-driven organization. More information will be available in the coming weeks with details on The Green Grid founding members as well as the organization's charter.
"Data center power consumption is a growing global concern on both a business and environmental level. The Green Grid was founded in order to bring the brightest minds in the industry together to help define innovative energy solutions that will improve performance-per-watt across the industry, today and tomorrow," said Marty Seyer, senior vice president, commercial and performance computing, AMD. "The Green Grid represents not only a call to action for other IT leaders but also a natural next step for a technology industry that is coming of age with respect to solving the world's more pressing problems and challenges. Based on the level of early interest, endorsements and participation levels, it is clear this organization is coming along at the right time to help solve energy issues in the data center and across all IT environments."
"Sun has long understood the need for broad industry coordination on energy efficient technology and sees The Green Grid as a complimentary effort to its work aligning the industry around a standard metric for energy consumption," said Ed Hunter, director, Eco Responsibility Initiative, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "As the demands on IT increase, it is the industry's responsibility to help customers make smarter choices around all issues in the data center, including energy consumption."
"For more than 10 years, HP has been addressing the power and cooling needs of customers," said Paul Perez, vice president, Storage, Networking and Infrastructure, Industry Standard Servers, HP. "Today, HP has extensive research, modeling tools, products and services that allow customers to provision and cool their data centers. HP is pleased to work with industry leaders through The Green Grid to create energy efficiency improvements at the component and system level."
"IBM is pleased to announce our intent to become a founding sponsor of The Green Grid," said Doug Balog, vice president and business line executive, IBM BladeCenter. "IBM has been a leader in innovation around power and cooling technologies and committed to implementing energy efficiency programs for more than 30 years. We look forward to working together with other like-minded companies to promote further innovation around power management in the data center."
The Green Grid is devoted to working closely with both the EPA and the Alliance. Both organizations are in full support of The Green Grid and will play a key role in the development of the organization's charter as well as collaborating to identify innovative solutions that cut energy costs as well as benefit the environment.
"The EPA is deeply concerned about the effects of increasing data center power consumption and associated rise in greenhouse gas emissions from data center operations," said Andrew Fanara, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, ENERGY STAR program. "We believe energy efficiency-focused technology innovation is key to addressing the significant impact that this growing energy use will have both on today's businesses and our environment. For that reason EPA is pleased to support the goals and mission of The Green Grid initiative. We look forward to communicating this initiative to our ENERGY STAR partners and encouraging them to participate in the development of what we are confident will quickly become an important resource for both vendors and industry end-users. We applaud AMD and founding sponsors HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems for helping to raise industry awareness of the need for solutions that will address these rapidly emerging critical issues."
"Business is a key economic sector that can benefit from employing energy efficiency technologies not only to save energy but also to save money, protect the environment and enhance our national energy security," said Alliance President Kateri Callahan. "We are pleased to join EPA in endorsing The Green Grid and helping to bring the energy-efficiency message to U.S. data centers, which represent a growing component of the business sector."
