Getting data centers to reduce power consumption has propelled major information technology vendors to join forces to attack this industry-wide issue. After all, no one company has the expertise to solve this complex problem alone. In February 2007, AMD, American Power Conversion, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Sun Microsystems, VMware, and others came together to form The Green Grid, a not-for-profit industry consortium to promote energy efficiency in the data center. The organization presently has more than 100 member companies, which together provide all of the hardware, software, computing platforms, and components found in a data center.

Recently, Enterpriseleadership.org sat down with two of The Green Grid board members -- Larry J. Lamers, who oversees industry standards at VMware, and Roger Tipley, director of the The Green Grid at Hewlett-Packard Company -- to learn what this organization is working on. [Note: Their responses reflect the view of The Green Grid, not view of the board members' respective companies.]

EL: Why should CIOs be interested in your organization?

LT: We're trying to create an environment where power consumption and data center efficiency can be monitored in real time. We're also providing data and guidance to enable them to make better decisions about the design and planning of their data centers before they're built. We want to help data center managers make better decisions about equipment deployment and ongoing data center operations. If you plug in a new piece of equipment, how do you assess its energy efficiency before you buy it, and then after you buy it? That's our challenge.

EL: How do you collaborate as a group?

LT: We have a broad range of activities going on, including four active workgroups in the technical committee. And each of those groups has between three, and four taskforces working on specific problems. We have regularly scheduled technical meetings, which could be face-to-face or via teleconferencing; we use a variety of tools to support our Web site, and to manage our meetings, documents, minutes, and attendance. A third-party management company oversees the workgroups and committees to make sure they get everything done properly.

EL: What are some of these taskforces that comprise the technical  committee, and what are some of their activities?

LT: Our workgroup on data collection and analysis gathers and aggregates useful metrics about current data centers, such as performance. We have the problem of trying to understand how today's data center works -- that's why we're building a database of data center characteristics. Meanwhile, the operations workgroup looks at best practices, such as how systems should run for daily data center efficiency. This workgroup will define standards that support findings coming out of the other committees. Although each workgroup has a charter, all the workgroups interact with each other. They are collectively working on how to measure and to quantify data center efficiency. At this point, the technical committee and the workgroups have a good idea of what constitutes data center efficiency. They now, however, need to get some metrics in place so data center managers can gauge where they are, and what types of improvements they need to make, if any.

The technology and strategy working group looks at emerging technologies. One of this group's taskforces is working on what standards will be useful for building the data center of the future.

EL: What best practices have surfaced so far?

LT: We're looking at best practices differently than most IT organizations would. We're focused on being able to provide a way to measure the energy efficiency in a data center. We want to find a way to measure one solution at a time.

In March 2007, we published a common-sense way to measure the  efficiency of the data center. Some of these best practices included checking your floor files, checking the power configuration on your servers, and making sure your floor layout follows the guidelines that were set up when you designed your data center.

Often, you'll design your data center one way, but over time, you tend to modify things. Because of that, your systems aren't running optimally any more. You'll find that the highest performance per watt you can get out of a server is when it is highly utilized. Thus, you might think of moving to virtualization.

EL: What standards are you working on?

LT: Many industry organizations are working on specifications and standards. On the other hand, we provide what a lot of IT people need -- a reference guide or a checklist of what they should be doing. The standards should come out around the metrics and the measurement technologies. We might see some standards for how to accumulate or to assess what goes into the data center so you can manage it effectively.

EL: What are some of your members doing to make their products more  energy efficient?

LT: It depends on who you're talking to. Given that the work per watt of power consumed is going up, server vendors have made their processors more efficient than they were a few years ago. Vendors of racks, UPSs, and cooling equipment are improving the efficiency of those pieces. We're looking at how each piece is optimized and factoring them into the data center as a hole.

EL: You've just mentioned what the hardware vendors are doing. Well,  how are companies making their software more "green"?

LT: Both Microsoft and VMware realize that power consumed for a server at rest at low utilization isn't significantly less than the power consumed at full utilization. So these companies now provide software aimed at increasing the utilization of servers so they are up in the 80-plus-percent workload range. If you turn off these servers, they are running at 20 or 25 percent. And, if you take three servers that are running at 25-percent utilization and you put that workload at 80-percent utilization, you'll get some energy savings.

EL: What will the data center of the future look like?

LT: Future data centers will offer a more scalable infrastructure. If your workload goes up and down, you need to be able to adjust the power utilization. We've seen some data centers where, if you turn off all of the servers, you'd still not have zero power utilized in the data center. The scalability of your load has to match the scalability of your infrastructure.

The pieces that go into building a data center will be more tightly coupled during the design phase of future data centers. In the past, you hired disparate vendors to provide various components, such as power and cooling, racks, servers, storage, and wiring. In the future, people will want to know ahead of time that things will work together. These data centers will take advantage of their environment, as well as the prevailing, natural effects that are useful for power and cooling.

EL: What government agencies are you working with and how are you dealing with the differences in foreign data centers' power requirements?

LT: We have some alliances with various European commissions to look at the requirements of foreign data centers. Here, we'll try to localize some of our activities. We recently announced a collaborative relationship with the U.S. Department of Energy and Energy Star.

For more information about The Green Grid, go to www.thegreengrid.org.

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Elizabeth M. Ferrarini is a writer from Boston,  Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.