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March Meeting Discusses Ways to Monitor Data Center Power
By Carrie Schmelkin TMCnet Web Editor
Everything these days seems to be going green, including data centers.
Earlier this month, the Green Grid Association, a global consortium of IT companies and professionals seeking to improve energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems, held its annual Technical Forum and Members Meeting. The main item of discussion was reinforcing how valuable data centers are to the global economy and introducing new tools to ensure that data centers are efficient, sustainable and cost effective.
"Data centers have fundamentally changed the way we work, communicate, and live in the global economy," said Rob Bernard, Microsoft (News 
- Alert) representative and board member of The Green Grid, in a statement. "Organizations of all sizes have the opportunity to transform data centers from an operational burden to a source of economic prosperity and ecologic sustainability. The Green Grid (News - Alert) is taking steps to ensure that any organization using a data center can move forward with confidence in knowing that we are making substantial progress in regional alignment in the area of sustainability, and we welcome and encourage active participation from others to assist us in this journey."
Server Technology (News - Alert), which designs and manufactures products to reduce downtime and improve data center power management, had been examining ways to bring efficiencies and reliability to data center power for years as well.
Through its Sentry Power Manager solution, managers can address all their data center power related challenges by measuring, monitoring and trending power at the server cabinet level all through a single interface. SPM gives you the data you need to make critical decisions regarding power efficiency, reliability, carbon footprint, temperature and humidity, all right at the rack level.
Currently, Green Grid has expanded its mission statement and is actively working on several projects that will help data centers become more efficient in handling power as well as natural resources such as energy, carbon and water. The organization recently announced a series of new initiatives including refining tools for data center management, coming up with new sustainability metrics and collaborating with governing bodies all over the world to figure out how to measure data center power efficiency.
Specifically, one initiative calls for the creation of new metrics WUE, or water usage effectiveness – a metric that assesses the water used on-site in operating a data center, including water used for humidification and water evaporated on-site for energy production or cooling of the data center and its support systems. Another metric includes DCcE, or data center compute efficiency, which enables data center operators to determine the efficiency of their compute resources.
Carrie Schmelkin is a Web Editor for TMCnet. Previously, she worked as Assistant Editor at the New Canaan Advertiser, a 102-year-old weekly newspaper, covering news and enhancing the publication's social media initiatives. Carrie holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and a bachelor's degree in English from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Janice McDuffee
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