The Green Grid http://www.thegreengrid.org, the growing non-profit group aimed at advocating for energy efficiency in the data center held a conference call on Friday to discuss several announcements pertaining to the organization's technical forum taking place today and tomorrow at the Parc 55 hotel in San Francisco.
On the call were Green Grid directors John Tucillo and John Pflueger, the latter of which is also a member of the organization's technical committee.
Beginning today, (not coincidentally the one-year anniversary of the Green Grid's launch in 2007) the technical forum is titled "Get Connected: Assess Today for Efficiency Tomorrow," a sort of rallying cry to help people understand the organization's goal.
Coinciding with the technical forum are several announcements from the organization.
The Green Grid says it committed to the industry a year ago that it would continue developing deliverables that could be built into a framework that will let end users to assess their data centers in a way that will enable them to improve their efficiency. Today, the organization says it is presenting that framework, and demonstrating how it operates.
The framework itself is comprised of tools and technologies, as well as strategies and methodologies, developed through the collaboration of the Green Grid's participants.
According to Pfleuger, four specific "deliverables" are being introduced at the tech forum this week, representing the efforts of three of the organization's original working groups:
Addressing Organizational Barriers to Managing Efficiency
In many cases, says Pfleuger, organizations are set up in such a way that the paying of the energy bill and the decision-making that affects that energy bill are handled by entirely separate groups
"This paper takes a look at that situation and offers some alternatives and some guidance on how to possibly address those organizational barriers."
Baseline Efficiency Market Study
Produced by the data collection and analysis working group, which goes out into the community, and puts together the picture for the rest of the technical committee.
"The first deliverable out of this group is a fairly comprehensive study on existing and common practices in the industry today with regard to improving energy efficiency and managing for efficiency."
The data came from personal interviews with data center owners and operators, drilling down into what they're doing today and may be doing in the future.
Peer Review of Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory on High Voltage Direct Current in the Data Center
"Folks who have been following this space is very aware that one of the questions that has a lot of visibility in the community is one of power distribution in the data center. In 2006 Lawrence Berkley completed a study on direct current in the data center. And as a result of that study, a lot of people have been interested in this particular technology, and what opportunity it affords for improving efficiency in the data center."
The power task force has completed a fairly extensive peer review of the study, and will be presenting that report at the tech forum.
Five Ways to Save Server Power
The operations working group, concerned with providing guidance for things that happen after a data center is commissioned, and day-to-day data center operations.
"This deliverable is essentially a best-practices sheet for saving server power."
The deliverables discussed in the call, in addition to being presented at the event, will include extensive white papers. While they don't currently appear to be available at the organization's website, they'll presumably be found here.
It was a long call, and this is becoming quite a long post. But rest assured there was more to discuss. I'll follow up tomorrow with some more interesting stuff.
