It appears more and more companies are undertaking a “sustainability initiative.” Evidently this is the next thing, now that worrying about global warming is a bit passe. But hey, we all still love the planet.
“It's a pattern that we've seen in the greenhouse gas reporting that the CarbonDisclosureProject regularly highlights, but the same holds true for green projects from supply chain greening to packaging redesign,” says industry observer Matthew Wheeland.
Now we have theGreenGrid, a consortium of technology companies dedicated to “boosting data center energy efficiency around the world,” announcing that they have published a paper that expands its efficiency metrics to include the carbon output of a data center, as well as the water use of a data center.
In Feb., TMC’s (News - Alert) Raja Chaudhary wrote that The Green Grid (News - Alert), advocating enhancement in energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems, launched new tools and declared it has gone into new industry alliances at its third annual Green Grid Technical Forum and Members’ Meeting.
"We see sustainability as a much broader issue than power," explained Christian Belady, Microsoft's (News 
- Alert) Director of Hardware Architecture and a board member at the Green Grid, who edited the white paper, to Wheeland. "How can we come up with some similar metric that will allow us to benchmark carbon intensity or efficiency in the data center, and then similarly with water?"
The grid “has constantly been working upon an array of both strategic and tactical projects to improve data center energy efficiency, with an aim to create a unique opportunity for worldwide industry collaboration,” Chaudhary wrote, noting that at this year’s meeting, “it announced a number of free, online tools that extend the benefits of the widely-used free cooling tools introduced in 2009.”
These tools include a power efficiency estimator, which enables data center operators to compare different scenarios of power topologies and technologies inside of their facility. On the basis of various factors such as workload, availability, and space constraints, the tool generates a report that is designed to improve decision-making in a facility.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by
Erin Monda
