Green Grid trails new datacentre guide

The Green Grid has this week announced plans for a new datacentre efficiency guide designed to help firms cut energy use and carbon emissions across their server farms.

Meeting at its annual technical forum in San Jose, California, the consortium of technology companies - formed in 2007 to introduce data centre energy efficiency metrics to the IT industry - said that it will launch Datacenter 2.0, a design guide for those wanting to create energy-efficiency computing facilities.

It also announced a new white paper outlining ways to measure useful work in the datacentre, along with an educational programme designed to help bolster awareness of green datacentre skills and techniques.

Datacenter 2.0, a "top-to-bottom" guide to designing power-efficient datacentres, will be published early next year. The result of a multi-year research effort, it is designed to create a broad overview of how to enhance energy efficiency within the datacentre, providing clear practical guidelines on different approaches for both new build sites and retrofit projects.

The Green Grid also discussed its most recently released white paper, called Proxies for Estimating Data Center Productivity, which was designed to measure useful work in the datacentre. It invited members to feed back on some of the recommendations that had been made in the paper.

It expanded on its existing standards by launching a white paper called PUE Scalability, designed to measure the energy consumption in a datacentre as the total IT workload increases. The white paper, written by consortium members, advocates measuring the datacentre's energy load every 15 minutes to help gauge this metric over time.

Last year, the consortium introduced power usage effectiveness (PUE) and data centre infrastructure efficiency (DCIE), two metrics designed to measure the power consumed by a datacentre and its energy efficiency.

The consortium also unveiled an educational initiative called the Green Grid Academy, which it will formally launch during the first half of this year. The academy will feature educational materials designed to help bolster knowledge of green datacentre design across the IT industry.