IBM, HP, AMD, Sun form green datacentre alliance

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 19 April 2006 13:39

Your IT - Home IT

A group of four global IT hardware players intend to form an alliance to help reduce growing power and cooling demands in enterprise datacentres. IBM, HP, AMD and Sun represent the founding sponsors of The Green Grid, an open, global organisation whose goals are supported by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Alliance to Save Energy.
Members of the new non-profit organisation aim to decrease the datacentre and other IT facility energy usage patterns by defining and propagating best practices in datacentre operation, as well as construction and design.

The Green Grid will be open to any IT industry professionals with an interest in addressing global energy consumption issues, particularly datacentre managers and IT operations executives. Founding membership is also open to companies such as ISVs, IHVs, systems integrators and VARs, analyst firms, utility companies and anyone else concerned about energy efficiency issues in the enterprise.

Members are welcome to participate by registering online at www.TheGreenGrid.org, an independently hosted site where they will share best practices, discuss challenges, and define solutions to the increasing energy demands from IT. The role of the sponsors will be to help enable and fund the member-driven organisation. More information will be available in the coming weeks with details on The Green Grid founding members as well as the organisation's charter.

"Datacentre power consumption is a growing global concern on both a business and environmental level. The Green Grid was founded in order to bring the brightest minds in the industry together to help define innovative energy solutions that will improve performance-per-watt across the industry, today and tomorrow," said Marty Seyer, senior vice president, commercial and performance computing, AMD.  "The Green Grid represents not only a call to action for other IT leaders but also a natural next step for a technology industry that is coming of age with respect to solving the world's more pressing problems and challenges. Based on the level of early interest, endorsements and participation levels, it is clear this organisation is coming along at the right time to help solve energy issues in the datacentre and across all IT environments."

"Sun has long understood the need for broad industry coordination on energy efficient technology and sees The Green Grid as a complementary effort to its work aligning the industry around a standard metric for energy consumption," said Ed Hunter, director, Eco Responsibility Initiative, Sun Microsystems. "As the demands on IT increase, it is the industry's responsibility to help customers make smarter choices around all issues in the datacentre, including energy consumption."        

"For more than 10 years, HP has been addressing the power and cooling needs of customers," said Paul Perez, vice president, Storage, Networking and Infrastructure, Industry Standard Servers, HP.  "Today, HP has extensive research, modeling tools, products and services that allow customers to provision and cool their datacentres.  HP is pleased to work with industry leaders through The Green Grid to create energy efficiency improvements at the component and system level."

"IBM is pleased to announce our intent to become a founding sponsor of The Green Grid," said Doug Balog, vice president and business line executive, IBM BladeCenter. "IBM has been a leader in innovation around power and cooling technologies and committed to implementing energy efficiency programs for more than 30 years.  We look forward to working together with other like-minded companies to promote further innovation around power management in the datacentre."