Major Vendors Push Green Standards

The Green Grid is a new standards body promoting energy efficiency in the IT industry. Backed by a who's who of vendors--AMD, APC, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Rackable Systems, SprayCool, Sun Microsystems and VMware--its goals are to reduce energy costs and help enterprises better manage energy usage. The Green Grid will develop industrywide metrics for power usage and efficiency, create technology standards and promote best practices for data center power management.

"We are seeing customers pay as much, if not more, for energy and power on a yearly basis as they are for purchasing computer equipment," says Tom Bradicich, IBM Fellow and VP of systems technology for the rack, blade and x86 servers, and a director on The Green Grid's board.

The first goal of the organization is to define standard metrics around energy usage and efficiency for IT hardware, particularly servers. Hardware vendors can then design products and compete in the market against those metrics.

Why bother with a new standards body? The Green Grid believes it can drive new standards more swiftly than existing organizations. "When one wants to accelerate a standard or initiative, it helps being able to travel in your own organization rather than an existing body with its own bylaws and initiatives," Bradicich says.IT vendors, enterprises and individuals are invited to join The Green Grid at thegreengrid.org. --Andrew Conry-Murray, [email protected]