Green Consortiums Proliferating

Are you ready for more industry groups offering "thought leadership" on data center and IT energy usage? Ready or not, here come two more: The Green Data Project and Lean & Green. The new groups herald two emerging strategies for "green" organizations. The Green Data Project (GDP) targets a particular niche (storage) within the data center ecosystem, while Lean & Green appears to be a vehicle to tout the products and services of one of its backers, storage vendor BlueArc.

The launch of the GDP was noted over at VMBlog.com, where the group's founder noted the growth of green groups. "There are many Green initiatives within the industry today," says Jon William Toigo, the founder of the Data Management Institute. "But almost all of them are advancing tactical measures involving hardware technologies rather than strategic approaches focused on archive and data management. Green IT must begin with green data. Otherwise a company's data center greening initiative amounts to little more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic."

Initial sponsors of the Green Data Project include FileTek, Clearview Software, QStar Technologies, KOM Networks, Plasmon, Caringo, C2C Systems, CA, Data Islandia and Zerowait.

Lean & Green, which was profiled in eWeek, describes its mission as "educating CIOs about ways IT organizations can benefit the environment, reduce power usage and lower costs through more efficient computing and data storage practices." But upon launch, that education consists primarily of marketing pitches for products for BlueArc, which is sponsoring the group along with the Business Performance Management (BPM) Forum.

The lead white paper offered by the group, titled "Lean & Green