Trend: Reducing energy consumption by computers is becoming a priority for purchasers. Computer and component manufacturers appear to be listening.
eWeek describes the birth of the Green Grid Alliance, which plans to reduce the energy use of servers in corporate data centers.
Link: Dell, Others Join AMD in Green Data Center Push
The Green Grid Alliance, which seeks to help cut the energy consumption of corporate data centers via education, the establishment of server power measurement standards and influencing product designs, arrives at a time when rising electrical rates, coupled with increases in the deployment of power-hungry servers, are causing major concerns about electricity consumption among many large businesses.
Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems, competitors who rarely see eye-to-eye, are seemingly putting aside their differences to promote greener corporate data centers.
Dell, along with American Power Conversion and VMware, on May 2 joined the Green Grid Alliance, founded on April 19 by companies including Advanced Micro Devices, HP, IBM and Sun.
AMD officials have said that the Green Grid Alliance will address data center power consumption and cooling, in part by looking at data center design and server deployment, as well as by fostering the creation of more energy-efficient computers and networking and storage gear. The group will also work toward creating standards for measuring server power consumption, which it says companies could use as tools to make better decisions about the machines they buy or other ways of fine-tuning their operations.
To date, there has been little oversight of data center power use and no real focus on how to curb it, said Henri Richard, AMD's chief sales and marketing officer.
Thus the Green Grid's first goal is to raise awareness about data center power, with the work on efforts to create power measurements and influence product designs coming later, AMD officials have indicated.
Meanwhile, the alliance may align with other like-minded groups, such as one—known loosely as the Eco Forum—that has been working on universal server power consumption measurements.
Representatives from AMD, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Sun and the EPA EnergyStar program have been involved in the Eco Forum effort, which also recently got off the ground.
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