Green Grid Tech Forum

Feb 3rd-4th saw the Green Grid Annual Technical Forum take place in the San Jose Marriott in California. This was the second annual technical forum I've attended and I must say I was quite impressed with the progress Green Grid have made over the last year.

I actually arrived a day earlier to take part in an international metrics harmonisation meeting that had been organised by the Green Grid and was attended by representatives from the Japanese Green IT Promotions Council (JIPC), Japanese Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry (METI), US-Environmental Protection Agency (US-EPA), US-Department of Energy (US-DoE), European Commission (EC) and the Green Grid themselves.

The objective of the group (who have met a number of times now) is to harmonise the development of metrics used within the data centre and ICT sectors to ensure we all work from the same yard stick.

The group have pretty much settled on the first metric (PUE) but has the challenge ahead of trying to define the 'productivity' of a data centre in terms of its output.

Green Grid a year ago came up with their DCeP metric which fell foul of the 'too complex to measure for most people' issue that then resulted in them turning to work on proxies which they proposed to the industry last year. Unfortunately there was no conclusive output from their work on the proxies last year and little has happened with them since then.

The Japanese have been busy too, presenting an alternative series of metrics for data centre and IT productivity which are now in review by the group.

The technical forum itself was well attended by industry folks from around the world, vendors and end users alike. There was a lot of interesting and useful information shared both days which in my capacity as BCS representative and consultant to Paolo Bertoldi at the EC I provided as much input to and feedback on as I could.

Green Grid do appear to be gaining traction now in terms of producing useful material for their members and the wider industry. I feel confident that the collaboration agreement I worked on for almost a year on behalf of the BCS data centre specialist group was the right way to progress the relationship between the two groups.

I also spent some time demonstrating the BCS Cost & Energy Simulator to members of the Green Grid board and technical working groups. It is my hope that the wider industry bodies such as Green Grid will pick up on the work done so far and contribute further to the development of the open source core.