The Green Grid, an industry consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in datacenters and computing ecosystems, will hold an inaugural summit on April 18 and 19 in Denver to establish its technical objectives. Participating in this event will be the first new members of the nonprofit group, which include power electronics suppliers such as Texas Instruments, Cherokee International, Coldwatt, and Active Power.
The summit—the first since the launch of the organization earlier this year—is expected to bring together leading technical experts from member companies to produce detailed technical objectives and program plans for 2007. The event is designed to help the Green Grid’s technical committee further define technical objectives in three key areas. These areas are definition and measurement of datacenter efficiency, guidance for datacenter owners and managers making decisions pertaining to datacenter architecture and planning, and guidance for datacenter 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.”
The power electronics companies taking part in the summit will lend their experience in addressing power supply efficiency for the datacenter. Meanwhile, these companies will also gain further insight into their customers current and future power supply requirements.
“Because power demand in servers is increasing at such a high rate, energy costs and equipment cooling represent real challenges to the end customer,” says Mike Wagner, vice president of marketing at Cherokee International, “As a supplier of ac-dc power supplies to the OEMs who sell their end equipment to the data center, we are in a position to support and influence the efforts of the Green Grid. By leveraging our expertise in power, we can help improve the efficiency of the power train as it is applied in server farms.”
“TI’s participation in Green Grid underscores our commitment to energy efficiency; from the way we operate to the products we develop,” says Tommy Darby, Texas Instruments’ worldwide datacenter strategy manager. “By getting involved, we want to contribute our experiences with high-density data center designs, implementations and experiences in dealing with challenges in this area around the world, as we continue to increase compute capacity for our designers. We look forward to collaborating with other industry leaders to achieve even greater energy conservation in data centers.”
John Tuccillo, another director of The Green Grid, notes that the initial efforts of the Green Grid have been well received. “The industry has enthusiastically responded to the formal launch of The Green Grid,” says Tuccillo. “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.”
In addition to the previously named power electronics vendors who’ve joined the Green Grid, the consortium has also announced other new members from various industry segments. These companies include 1E Ltd., 365 Main, Affiniti, Allstate Insurance, Aperture Technologies, Azul Systems, BT plc, Brocade Communications, Chatsworth Products, Cisco, COPAN Systems, Digital Realty Trust, Eaton, Force10 Networks, Juniper Networks, Netezza, Novell, Panduit Corporation, Pillar Data Systems, Qimonda, QLogic, Rackspace, SGI, SatCon Stationary Power Systems, The 451 Group and Vossel Solution.
The new members join founding members AMD, APC, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Rackable Systems, SprayCool, Sun Microsystems and VMware. Companies interested in attending the summit are encouraged to contact the Green Grid for membership opportunities.
The Green Grid does not endorse any vendor-specific products or solutions, and will seek to provide industry-wide recommendations on best practices, metrics and technologies that will improve overall data center energy efficiencies. Membership is open to companies interested in data center operational efficiency at the Contributing or General Member levels.
General members attend and participate in general meetings of the Green Grid, review proposals for specifications and have access to specifications for test suites and design guidelines and IP licensing. Additional benefits for contributor members include participation and voting rights in committees and working groups. Additional details are available at www.thegreengrid.org.