The Green Grid Plans More Online Tools

greengrid-puecalculator

A screen shot from a PUE calculator that will soon be released by The Green Grid.

The Green Grid said today that it will release more online tools to build upon the group's introduction of free cooling tools in 2009. The new calculators will be available by the end of March, and were announced during the Third Annual Green Grid Technical Forum in San Jose, Calif., where the group also outlined the availability of several educational resources. The tools include:

Power Efficiency Estimator
The Power Efficiency Estimator is designed to help data center operators compare different scenarios of power topologies and technologies inside of their facility. It takes factors such as workload, availability, and space constraints into consideration and generates a report that is designed to improve decision-making in a facility.

PUE Calculator
The new PUE Calculator allows data center operators to easily input their facility’s specific data at regular intervals to determine their PUE. Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), a metric popularized by The Green Grid, determines the amount of energy used by the facility and the IT gear inside of it.

The Green Grid, a data center consortium focused on energy efficiency, also announced the availability of a new white paper (Impact of Virtualization on Data Center Physical Infrastructure) and a book co-authored with ASHRAE titled “Real Time Energy Consumption Measurements in Data Centers” that focuses on energy consumption measurements for the determination of energy efficiency. The book is free to member companies of The Green Grid and is available for purchase or download through the ASHRAE bookstore for $54.

The group has also launched a self-directed online course, "Data Center 101: Constrained Capacity,” to help data center managers and operators get familiar with industry lexicon and solutions to everyday data center challenges. The course is available through the Green Grid Academy.

Work Continues on Design Guide
The Green Grid's third technical forum will pick up where if left off a year ago, with sessions today discussing the two major initiatives announced at the 2009 forum: efforts to develop a new metric for data center productivity and publish a “Data Center 2.0" design guide.

The group says it has made "significant progress" on the design guide, with an outline and draft chapters now posted for member comment. The productivity discussion is moving  slowly, with no clear consensus having emerged on the best way to proceed.

Collaboration Continues
The Green Grid also hailed its new collaboration with Data Center Pulse, an end user  group that has using social media tools to bring together global data center owners and operators to discuss best practices and industry trends.

"It's absolutely crticial for this industry to collaborate," said Christian Belady of Microsoft, the treasurer of The Green Grid. "Data Center Pulse has developed a pretty large community of end users. What we've done in the past year is create a well-oiled ecosystem of industry organizations, walking together rather than struggling against one another."

There are still stakeholders that are largely missing from the table, however. "We haven't yet had a strong influx of utilities into The Green Grid," said Roger Tipley of HP, who serves as a vice president of The Green Grid. "We want to understand better how data centers and utilities can talk with one another."