The “Green Grid”, a new kind of super hero comes to town

Robust growth in the IT sector and in companies’ use of technology is leading to an acute power shortage, according to analyst firm Gartner. An independent study found that server electricity use doubled between 2000 and 2005 and could spike another 75 percent by 2010. Did you know that a large server farm uses as much energy as a city of 40,000 people? Gartner research team estimates that, “Half the world’s datacenters will run out of power by the end of 2008”. That means, as utility costs increase and energy needs advance, datacenters will not be able to keep up with the costs needed to run them. A group of leading IT firms has banded together to try to Tackle the datacenter power shortage and head off an impending energy crisis. This group includes, Microsoft, IBM, Sun, HP, Intel, AMD, Rackable Systems, and VMWare. They have formed a nonprofit group called, “The Green Grid” to drive new metrics, technology standards, and best practices for curbing power consumption. Other independent companies have begun developing products to address these issues. A firm called ColdWatt, spun off from Rockwell Scientific in 2004 to develop a digital power conversion technology for AC-DC power subsystems. The fact is, more than 50 percent of typical datacenter power consumption today is used for power delivery. The new system uses magnetics to increase energy storage in its power supplies and digital controls to boost efficiency and flexibility. According to the company, its front-end power supplies boast better than 90 percent efficiency, compared with the 70 percent efficiency level of commodity power supplies. Replacing your existing power supplies with more efficient alternatives from ColdWatt could save US$50,000 a year for a 400-server datacenter. Joshua Levitt E-Commerce Sales and Marketing Manager UsedCisco.com Green Your network…reuse