IT's Green Grid gathers momentum

The IT industry's growing commitment to environmental sustainability was underlined again yesterday as The Green Grid consortium of leading technology vendors announced plans for its first summit and revealed it had recruited 28 new members since its official launch earlier this year.

The non-profit consortium said the technical summit would be held on April 18-19 in Denver and would focus on enhancing the energy efficiency of large data centres or server farms. In particular it said the meeting would aim to further define the Green Grid's technical objectives in three key areas: "definition and measurement of data centre efficiency, guidance for data centre owners and managers making decisions pertaining to datacenter architecture and planning, and guidance for data centre owners and managers looking to improve energy efficiency during day-to-day operations".

"This inaugural technical summit signals the swift pace with which The Green Grid is moving to further define our technical objectives for 2007 and beyond," said Bruce Shaw, director of The Green Grid. "Participation from the industry’s leading data center efficiency experts will ensure our continued progress in helping the industry achieve greater data center energy efficiency."

After a slow first year when the Green Grid attracted some criticism for making little real progress the consortium has enjoyed rapid growth since it officially launched this February with the news that both Intel and Microsoft had signed up to the group. Since then 28 new companies from right across the IT industry have joined the consortium, increasing the likelihood of industry wide agreement on energy efficiency metrics and best practices.

"The industry has enthusiastically responded to the formal launch of The Green Grid," said John Tuccillo, director of The Green Grid. "With leading companies from across technology market segments joining the consortium, we can now truly bring the collective expertise of the industry to bear on this industry-wide challenge. We welcome our new members and invite other industry leaders to consider membership."

The new members are: 1E Ltd, 365 Main, Active Power, Affiniti, Aperture, Azul Systems, BT plc, Brocade Communications, Chatsworth Products, Inc., Cherokee International, Cisco, ColdWatt Inc., COPAN Systems, Digital Realty Trust, Eaton, Force10 Networks, Juniper Networks, Netezza, Novell, Pillar Data Systems, Panduit Corp., QLogic, Rackspace Managed Hosting, SGI, SatCon Stationary Power Systems, Texas Instruments, The 451 Group and Vossel Solution.

They join founding members AMD, APC, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Rackable Systems, SprayCool, Sun Microsystems and VMware as part of the Green Grid.