Green Tech

The Green Grid, a group of IT industry leaders including heavyweights like AMD and Hewlett-Packard, unveiled a new standard for measuring data center efficiency at the second annual Green Grid Technical Forum in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday.

The white papers released by the consortium have been advising companies on how to properly measure, quantify, analyze and report on PUE (power usage effectiveness) and DCiE (data center infrastructure efficiency) since 2007.

Click on the image to take a tour of an existing California data center designed for efficiency.

(Credit: Elsa Wenzel, CNET)

"At the 2009 Technical Forum, attendees will walk away with actionable information to help measure energy consumption and significantly improve energy cost savings," Larry Vertal, director of the Green Grid and senior strategist at AMD, said in a statement.

The Green Grid's white paper released Wednesday adds a new metric for IT folks to think about.

It's called PUE Scalability.

"However, to better assess how well a facility's infrastructure handles the dynamic changes in IT power loads, a data center needs to understand how well its total energy consumption scales with changes in IT power load," said the white paper, whose contributors include employees from HP, Dell, and Emerson Network Power.

The paper suggests through sample scenarios and formulas that it's not enough to look at long-term facility assessments, but that managers need to evaluate how their infrastructure deals with fluctuations in IT equipment power loads throughout a given day in order to make them more efficient.

For that, the group recommends measuring something it calls PUE Scalability, a formula which includes tracking a data center's energy consumption roughly every 15 minutes to evaluate its responses to fluctuations in usage.

It further recommends the use of "meters, monitors and analysis tools" that can evaluate power usage and response to loads in real-time.

The new paper is a follow-up to the Green Grid's February 2007 proposal in which the organization introduced the idea of using the PUE and DCiE (originally called DCE) system to compare the efficiencies of data centers, as well as suggesting some efficiency-oriented best practices.

This latest suggestion from the Green Grid is not revolutionary.

Companies like Sentilla have already begun to offer hardware and software tools for real-time data center energy consumption evaluations. But with a significant group like the Green Grid behind the practice, data center managers may now take more interest in those types of products.

Despite high-profile pledges by major tech companies to green the grid, efforts to improve efficiency in data centers remain stunted, according to two recent studies.

Fifty-one percent of companies have a solid plan to green their IT operations, down from 55 percent in 2007, according to a study released Monday by Digital Realty Trust. The company owns and manages corporate data centers.

But highly publicized efforts to improve data center performance and design include those of the Green Grid consortium of tech bigwigs such as Microsoft and Advanced Micro Devices. The Climate Savers initiative, backed by Google, the World Wildlife Federation, and dozens of other organizations, aims to halve computing power consumption by 2010.

Click on this image for a photo gallery tour of efforts by Silicon Valley data centers to go green.

(Credit: Elsa Wenzel)

An overwhelming and growing majority surveyed by BPM expressed a need for industry standards for efficiency as well as for heating and cooling systems. Given the absence of such guidelines, more than 60 percent said they turn instead to green building standards from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design from the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council.

However, 80 percent noted that they look at a broad number of factors to green data centers, taking into account hardware as well as the design and operations of the overall facilities.

Fewer company representatives expressed plans to pursue carbon credits to make up for their operations' emissions: 18 percent in the recent survey, showing a drop from one-quarter in 2007.

IT power consumption cost at least $1 million for 20 percent of respondents, and upwards of $10 million for 8 percent of them. The study contacted decision makers at companies with 5,000 or more employees in March.

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And although power demand by data centers doubled between 2000 and 2005 , the Business Performance Management Forum found a similar lack of efficiency improvements in its study released earlier in April.

Three-quarters of those surveyed graded themselves a "C" or worse for green computing, and 65 percent said they lacked precise plans for improvement. But nearly half of respondents noted that their use of IT-related energy grew in 2007. Forty-six percent even ran out of space, power, or cooling systems.

A Forrester report in March predicted that spending on green IT services will grow by 60 percent each year to $4.8 billion by 2013.

Efforts to purchase eco-friendly and energy-efficient IT equipment have expanded notably since the spring, according to 130 companies surveyed by Forrester Research.

Some 38 percent of corporations said they take environmental concerns into account when making purchasing decisions, a jump from 25 percent surveyed in April.

The top reason for going green was slashing energy costs, cited by 55 percent of respondents. Doing the right thing for the environment was the next most popular motivation, noted by half of those surveyed. And 95 percent called environmental concerns either somewhat or very important to operations.

However, the study found that most firms haven't yet put such intentions to action. Although only 15 percent said they have a solid green IT plan, 25 percent are in the process of making one, and 39 percent are considering it.

Awareness of vendors' attempts to green the design, operation, and disposal of their products has grown to 29 percent--from 15 percent in the spring.

The report recommended that firms make executive commitments to greener policies. They should also assess their energy expenses and carbon footprints without making unrealistic promises or rushing into carbon offset programs, Forrester suggested.

Most of the corporations polled are in North America or Europe and have at least 1,000 employees.