Server power-savers group formed

Sun, AMD, HP and IBM last week launched the Green Grid, a group of manufacturers that is promoting energy saving computing.

The nonprofit organization is endorsed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Alliance to Save Energy, an organization that was formed to help IT deal with increasing power consumption and heat issues in the data center.

The formation of the group may lead to issuance of an Energy Star-like certification for servers, representatives from the group said.

The Green Grid may also lead to a series of best practices and stories on the success of organizations adopting ‘Green Grid’ practices or equipment.

These organizations met last week with the EPA and Lawrence Berkeley Labs and said they may develop a power metric similar to benchmarks from the SPEC or TPC that measures the energy efficiency of servers, blade servers and other computing devices.

They say this metric will be similar to a miles-per-gallon metric for automobiles. The proposed metric would be expected to be available this summer.

The group is not without competing pressures in its organization. AMD’s Opteron processor, which Sun, HP and IBM use in their respective servers, consumes 95 watts of power compared to Intel’s Xeon, which consumes 110 to 165 watts.

Although 83% of respondents to a study commissioned by AMD said that heat and cooling issues in the data center was their No. 1 problem, only 20% said they had methods to fix it.

Membership in the group is free. Among the companies invited to join was Intel, which failed to respond. Companies interested in joining the Green Grid can register online.