Three white papers were released by The Green Grid today, one explaining the importance of energy-efficient data centres, another providing guidelines for energy-efficient data centres, and the third suggesting metrics for energy efficiency.

The Green Grid members include Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), American Power Comversion (APC), Dell, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Intel, International Business Machines (IBM), Microsoft and Sun.

Part of the problem is that it doesn't make much sense to compare power consumption without also comparing the amount of work being done. If one server uses 10 percent more power than another, but also does 20 percent more processing, that's a good thing.

The non-profit Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC; perhaps best known for the SPECmark benchmarks for PCs) is already working on performance benchmarks appropriate for servers. For example, it updated this month the SPECjAPPServer2004 benchmark for Java 2 Enterprise Edition servers.{moscomment}