Green Grid to announce new datacentre efficiency standards

Datacentre efficiency consortium the Green Grid has signed an agreement with the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) to create a new datacentre energy management standard.

The standard, designed to bring together energy monitoring of both IT and non-IT systems in the datacentre, will be announced at the Green Grid Technical Forum and Members’ Meeting in San Francisco this Tuesday and Wednesday. The agreement will eventually produce an interface, based on the DMTF's Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standard.

"It's really a methodology to try and get everything working together," said John Pflueger, a director at the Green Grid. "We see this as another important step at helping the end user to arrive at a better solution for energy efficiency."

The organisation will also deliver a brace of materials this week designed to help IT chiefs refine energy-saving techniques in enterprise computing. One study will offer best practices on how to bring together facilities management groups and IT teams, enabling those that pay corporate energy bills and the computing departments that use the energy to work better together.

Additionally, a Baseline Efficiency Market Study is expected outline the current state of play in datacentre energy management, while a peer reviewed version of a study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will focus on the effectiveness of using high-voltage DC electricity in datacentre environments. The consortium is also set to present a raft of proposals for cutting server power.

The Green Grid was unable to say how much of this work would result in immediate deliverables. The Lawrence Berkeley study was still in the final stages of preparation late last week, and Pflueger could not explain exactly what kinds of applications the interface for the DMTF work would be used for.

The Green Grid was formed in February last year. Its two primary deliverables thus far have been the Power Usage Effectiveness and Data Centre Efficiency metrics, designed to help IT managers measure the energy efficiency of datacentres.

The announcements come a week after UK IT industry trade body Intellect announced the launch of a group of ten technology companies that will contribute to its energy and the environment work programme.

The group includes senior executives from Accenture, Dell, Deloitte, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, Memset, Microsoft and Sharp, and will be chaired by Intel UK and Ireland country manager Graham Palmer.