The Green Grid recently announced Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). The Green Grid's agreement with the EPA will first promote energy efficiency in EPA computer facilities and then broadly share results in order to impact change within both other governmental agencies and the private sector. The alliance with SNIA is designed to further networked storage best practices for energy efficiency.

The Green Grid's Memorandums of Understanding with the EPA and SNIA highlight the organization's continuing efforts and progress in working with government agencies and key industry players to define and promote the adoption of standards, processes, measurements and technologies for energy efficiency in the data centre.

The Green Grid signs MOU with the EPA
The Green Grid's collaboration with the EPA will accelerate the adoption of best practices for energy efficiency in existing computer/server rooms throughout the EPA. As an initial step The Green Grid and the EPA will identify an existing small EPA computer/server room as a target for an energy efficiency showcase, and execute a public project demonstrating the feasibility, approach and benefits of optimization. The results, best practices and real-world takeaways from this project will be shared with other governmental agencies, industry stakeholders and the private sector.

"The goal of the agreement between the EPA and The Green Grid is to build further collaboration between the private and public sectors, and to set an example by improving energy efficiency in federal government computer facilities," said Roger Tipley, director of The Green Grid. "The Green Grid will play a key role in this project by providing a team of technical experts who will perform the assessment and direct strategies and techniques for maximizing energy efficiency."

The Green Grid and the EPA formalized their MOU in a signing ceremony held in Washington, D.C. highlighted by remarks from EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson and John Tuccillo, director of The Green Grid.

The Green Grid signs MOU with SNIA
Recently, SNIA announced a formal alliance with The Green Grid. The Green Grid will work with
SNIA and its Green Storage Initiative to develop and promote standards, measurement methods, processes and technologies to improve data centre energy efficiencies. SNIA will use its expertise in networked storage and membership (over 400 member companies and 7,000 individual members) to work with The Green Grid on best storage practices for achieving more efficient storage infrastructures, including more efficient storage networking technologies.

"Addressing the challenges associated with energy efficiency and green computing will require collaboration across all IT areas, including the storage industry" said Vincent Franceschini, chair of the SNIA. "The Green Grid is a key industry organization for improving energy efficiency within data centres and business computing ecosystems. Through its Green Storage Initiative ? dedicated to applying the technical and educational expertise of the storage industry to develop and find more energy efficient solutions in the data centre ? SNIA will work with The Green Grid to develop best practices and education for the industry."

"Within the IT industry, there are a number of professionals who are responsible for data centre functionality ? from CIOs and IT managers, to heating and cooling experts. It is imperative that we look at the energy efficiency issue from a single, united point of view," said Mark Monroe, director of The Green Grid. "Together we can leverage each other's core expertise and areas of focus to deliver a holistic and complete approach for an energy efficient data centre."

Turning Japanese

The Green Grid has formed two new Japan Work Groups as well as a formal relationship with The Green IT Promotion Council. Responding to strong industry and government demand, these steps are designed to expand the organization's presence to Asia with initial operations in Japan. Representing an important opportunity for The Green Grid to extend its IT energy efficiency advocacy to this key region, the new Japan Work Groups are expected to enable The Green Grid to establish a unique set of best practices, metrics and technologies tailored for locally-based organizations.

"The Green Grid is responding to a long and strong history in Japan to improve data centre energy efficiency," said John Tuccillo, director of The Green Grid. "The launch of these new Work Groups will position The Green Grid to make strategic, tailored recommendations to Japanese businesses and organizations, with the goal to promote a sustained increase in energy efficiency."

Reporting to the Technical Committee, the Japan Data Collection and Analysis Work Group will be chartered with collecting and analyzing data from The Green Grid's Japanese member companies and to ensure that consortium recommendations are tailored appropriately for Japan-based organizations. In addition, the Japan Communications Work Group will promote the key findings of the Technical Committee to Japanese IT professionals including data centre managers, serve as a point of engagement for Japanese organizations interested in collaborating with The Green Grid, and support local marketing and IT energy efficiency events.

New Relationship with The Green IT Promotion Council
The Green Grid has also formalised a working relationship with The Green IT Promotion Council (GIPC) by signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that will enable The Green Grid and GIPC to work together to outline the information that they will exchange and the joint activities they will conduct to improve overall IT energy efficiency. This new MOU with GIPC will allow both The Green Grid and GIPC to convey relevant information to their respective member organizations.

The Green IT Promotion Council President Tsutomu Handa said, "The Green IT Promotion Council welcomes this partnership with The Green Grid. The Green IT Promotion Council recognizes global warming as a crucial challenge that must be taken on immediately, and we believe that epoch-making technological innovations will be necessary in order to harmonize our economic and social activities with the global environment. Recent government initiatives, a strengthening of partnerships among industry, government and the academy, as well as this collaboration with The Green Grid, typify the enhancement of relations with organizations overseas. And we have high hopes that through these efforts we will be able to make the concepts of "energy conservation for IT" and "energy conservation by IT" a reality."

"The Green Grid is pleased to expand our ecosystem of industry partners by working with GIPC to promote energy efficient IT policies and educate users on steps they can take to improve IT energy efficiency," said Jon Haas, a representative of The Green Grid. "This collaboration will allow The Green Grid to learn from and integrate established policies with best practices and metrics tailored for the Japanese IT community."
The Green Grid Japan Website
To facilitate worldwide communications, The Green Grid has unveiled a new Japanese language Web site designed to aid the promotion of The Green Grid's best practices, metrics and technologies to Japanese businesses and organizations. Interested parties can learn more about The Green Grid, including how to participate in the new Japan Work Groups, by visiting www.thegreengrid.org/japanese/ .
The Green Grid Japanese member companies include GMO Hosting, Fujitsu Limited, Fujitsu FIP Corporation, Hitachi, Ltd., Internet Initiative Japan Inc., ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation, NEC Corporation, Nomura Research Institute, NTT COMWARE Corporation, NTT DATA CORPORATION, NTT Facilities, SOFTBANK IDC Corp and TEPCO.

www.thegreengrid.org

BOX OUT ITEM

Energy productivity

The Green Grid has published a new white paper, entitled "A framework for data centre energy productivity. Recent studies by industry and government (EPA ? Report to Congress) have highlighted the issue of rapidly escalating data centre energy consumption. Faced with the limited availability of additional electrical energy, many CIOs are forced to consider relocating their data centres or adding additional capacity situated in remote locations. For those who have an abundant supply of power, there is still the issue of the ever increasing power bill. A fundamental issue facing the data centre manager is: "How do I control my energy costs without impacting the delivery of critical IT services my customers demand?" Required are new tools that allow the continuous monitoring of the work product of the data centre as a function of energy consumed. Up to now, standardised tools to measure the productivity of a data centre have not been available. The white paper presents:
- a technical analysis of the problem of assessing the energy efficiency of a data centre and the IT equipment that composes the data centre,
- - an examination of various power and energy efficiency metrics that have been proposed, and a discussion of their attributes and applicability, and
- - an analysis of ways in which those attributes fall short of providing the comprehensive tools necessary to optimise data centre energy utilisation.
The paper introduces a new family of data centre resource optimisation metrics designated collectively as Data Centre Productivity (DCP) metrics and presents the first derivative metric within this family, called Data Centre energy Productivity (DCeP). The DCeP metric provides a unique analytical tool that may be used to track the overall work product of a data centre per unit of energy expended to produce this work. While DCeP in its current form is only applicable to improvements in a single data centre, it is hoped that this work will provide a framework to develop similar metrics for comparing across different data centres.

ShareThis

Tags: Applications, Hosting & Colocation, Design & Facilities Management, Networks & Telco , Security, Servers, Storage Networking

Read more White Papers»

More DCS TV»

More Audio»

Read more Web Exclusives»

Read more Magazine Articles»

Read more Supplements »

Keep up to date with the latest industry products, services and technologies from the world's leading IT companies.

• Virtualization Success Depends on Network Automation by Infoblox

• The Infoblox VMware vCenter Orchestrator Plug-in by Infoblox

• Automated Storage Tiering on Infortrend’s ESVA Solution by Infortrend

• Why Cloud Backup: Top 10 Reasons by Autonomy

• How to Measure the ROI of Cloud Data Protection by Autonomy

Latest IT jobs from leading companies.

Click here for full listings»