Blossoming Green Grid to hold first technical summit

A consortium of companies and individuals seeking to lower overall power consumption in data centers, The Green Grid announced today that its ranks have swelled to 39 members since the group was formally announced in February. The 28 new members, which include heavy-hitters such as Cisco, Brocade, Juniper, and Novell, as well as large technology consumers, such as BT (British Telecom), should contribute valuable mindshare when members convene in Denver on April 18 and 19 for the group’s first technical summit.

According to The Green Grid, the summit is intended to give the group’s technical committee an opportunity to further define technical objectives addressing three key areas: definition and measurement of data-center efficiency; guidance for data-center owners and managers making decisions pertaining to datacenter architecture and planning; and guidance for data-center 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 and director of worldwide commercial and enterprise marketing at AMD. “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.”

“This is where the meat of the Green Grid’s work will take place,” noted Green Grid director Mark Monroe, director of sustainable computing at Sun.

Having representation from networking, storage, and end-user companies is essential for the group to meets its goals. From the get-go, the group has wanted to tackle the question of measuring energy-consumption in the data center holistically — from power supplies to processors to servers to cooling to storage to networking gear to applications — rather than in a piece-meal fashion. “You can optimize any one piece of puzzle and still have only a suboptimal solution,” said Green Grid Director Larry Lamers, senior engineering manager at VMware.

Among storage vendors now on The Green Grid roster is Copan Systems. Roger Archibald, the company’s vice president of business development, noted that while much of the focus of data-center energy consumption is directed at server usage, storage devices play a major role, sucking up as much as 38% of the power. And storage will continue to take its toll as companies face a data explosion, thanks to regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

The addition of end-user companies like BT also plays a critical role, according to Sun’s Monroe. “Having end-user organizations as part of the Green Grid helps us to keep the IT companies in line in terms of the defining useful measurements [for users],” he said. “We can come up with great ideas of what we want the measure to be, but they’ll tell us which will be the most valuable, so we know we’re not barking up the wrong tree.”

Following is a list of all 28 new members of The Green Grid: 1E, 365 Main, Active Power, Affiniti, Aperture, Azul Systems, BT, Brocade Communications, Chatsworth, Cherokee International, Cisco, Coldwatt, Copan Systems, Digital Realty Trust, Eaton, Force10 Networks, Juniper Networks, Netezza, Novell, Pillar Data Systems, Panduit, QLogic, Rackspace, SGI, SatCon Stationary Power Systems, Texas Instruments, The 451 Group, and Vossel Solution.

Founding companies of the group include AMD, APC, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Rackable Systems, SprayCool, Sun, and VMware.

The Green Grid’s technical committee summit takes place on April 18 and 19 in Denver, and it’s open to all contributing members of the consortium– even those who have yet to join. Contributing membership costs $25,000. More information is available at The Green Grid Web site at thegreengrid.org.