In the first 18 months of its existence, The Green Grid has grown from 11 founding members to 198 members worldwide as of early September. Particularly over the last year, the organization has been on a steady march to forge important alliances with other industries--most notably the heating and HVAC industries--and other regions of the world.

Founded in February 2007 by 11 U.S.-based companies (see list of companies below), The Green Grid is a consortium of companies working to develop and promote best practices, measurement methods and processes to advance energy efficiency in data centers and business computing. The group has established two metrics—the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric and the Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DiCE) metric—that data center operators and product vendors can use to measure energy efficiency consistently across various building configurations and product mixes.

The Green Grid now extends to Europe and Japan, with two working groups in each region. Their goal is to ensure that The Green Grid’s recommendations include regional issues regarding data center efficiency and are tailored to regional businesses and organizations, according to The Green Grid. In May The Green Grid launched a Japanese-language Web site designed to promote its best practices, metrics and technologies to Japanese businesses and organizations (http://www.thegreengrid.org/japanese/home)

The group also has signed memorandums of understanding (MoUs) with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). The EPA MoU, signed in April 2008, focuses on promoting energy efficiency in government computer rooms by using an EPA computer room as a showcase. The hope is that it will not only accelerate adoption of best practices for energy efficiency throughout EPA but also provide a means of developing and sharing best practices with other government agencies and the private sector.

“The goal of the agreement between the EPA and The Green Grid is to build further collaboration between the private and public sectors and to set an example by improving energy efficiency in federal government computer facilities,” says Roger Tipley, a director of The Green Grid.

The SNIA MoU joins its efforts to the two groups in promoting energy efficiency. The collaboration will leverage SNIA expertise in networked storage and The Green Grid’s expertise in data centers and business computing ecosystems.

The Green Grid also has reached out beyond the IT industry. It is collaborating with the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), a consortium dedicated to advancing the adoption of interoperable management standards. The two groups expect to develop standards to improve the interoperability of management across all levels of the data center, including IT and non-IT equipment. More recently, in August, The Green Grid forged a cooperative publication agreement with the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) designed to share technical information, particularly guidance regarding energy efficiency, between the two groups.

The Green Grid’s founding members

AMD

APC

Dell

HP

IBM

Intel

Microsoft

Rackable Systems

SprayCool

Sun Microsystems

VMware

Tam Harbert is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.

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