Library & Tools

The industry has seen a considerable, disruptive change in recent years, essentially seeking to “leap-frog” itself in how it delivers value in every sector it serves. Looking forward, what should ASHRAE and The Green Grid’s collaborative relationship look like as these two organizations support the desired “leap-frog affect” the industry is driving?

In October 2012, Nomura Research Institute opened its newest data center in Tokyo, Japan. This session will examine the data center’s innovative “double deck floor” design, which will help reduce overall air handling and facility electricity needs. As a result, it is anticipated that neither additional building side modifications nor further capital spending will be needed for 30 to 40 years or maybe even longer.

This session will walk attendees through EMC’s data center strategy; highlighting their new Private Cloud Data Center. EMC representatives will review the sustainable features of the building, new IT infrastructure architecture, and recent and future efficiency projects.

This session will present an update on the current status and accomplishments of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR program. In addition, this session will look ENERGY STAR’s plans for the next several years, focusing on the IT and data center area. Furthermore, this session will include a discussion on IT product specification work, international outreach, data center labeling, and other program activities currently underway or planned to begin soon.

This session will explore the European Commission's Code of Conduct on Data Centers, which is comprised of a series of voluntary, light-touch measures. This session will examine how these measures can help operators improve the energy efficiency of their data centers. In addition, these measures could contribute to forming the basis of more stringent legislation in the future. However, other challenges related to local legal frameworks and energy policies will have to be addressed first.

Data center managers are often requesting lower harmonics numbers, but they do not always understand what the appropriate numbers are and why. Zero harmonics does not necessarily mean a better data center operating environment. This session will help attendees understand how to balance harmonics and efficiency, while providing a general overview of harmonics, including what they are and what they do.

This session will explore the interface between data center managers and the developer, and the critical role that incentives, software design, and operations plays in improving the effectiveness of our data center investments.

This session will look at the European Commission’s effort to address the growth in data centers focuses on their overall resource efficiency and environmental footprint. The development and use of relevant international standards and metrics is considered essential, but not sufficient to achieve improved efficiency. This session will also address the challenges of maintaining data centers in urban settings, where competition for resources and pressures to reduce GHG emissions is greatest.

Are utility incentives making the ‘grid’ any greener? Recent management theory suggests that “incentives don’t work,” yet utility rebate programs subsidize corporate energy efficiency investments with millions of ratepayer dollars each year. The Green Grid is currently studying the influence of utility incentives on the IT industry, and this interactive session will offer a first look at the results of this first-of-its-kind research. Audience input will be collected during the session and may be incorporated into the upcoming publication on this interesting topic area.

This presentation will introduce the audience to EDE, and why it is important. It will also provide initial guidance as to how it can be calculated and guidelines for its use. Last, it will cover suggested next steps as well as issue a call-to-action for organizations interested in piloting the new metric.

This session will cover the Data Center Maturity Model (DCMM), which outlines capability descriptors by area such that users can understand their current performance, determine their levels of maturity, and identify the ongoing steps and innovations necessary to achieve greater energy efficiency and sustainability, both today and into the future. The maturity model touches upon every aspect of the data center including power, cooling, compute, storage and network.

Operational risks, efficiency, TCO, taxes, and sustainability are among the many factors that come into play when determining the appropriate site for a data center. This session will examine these and other site selection criteria, as well as offer end user guidance on resource efficient and sustainable data center site selection methodology and practice.

With only renewable hydropower and a cold climate, Norway has a unique setting for powering the emerging cloud. This session will deliver an overview of the newly developed free air-cooling technology from Fjord IT, and will also present new concepts on how data center operations can be set up with less cost and higher efficiency.

This session will explore the European Commission's Code of Conduct on Data Centers, which is comprised of a series of voluntary, light-touch measures. This session will examine how these measures can help operators improve the energy efficiency of their data centers. In addition, these measures could contribute to forming the basis of more stringent legislation in the future. However, other challenges related to local legal frameworks and energy policies will have to be addressed first.

In the past year, big data has exploded onto the technology scene with new applications, new products, new terminology, and lots and lots of hype. But what is it really, and moreover, what does it mean for the IT professional? During this session, industry experts and big data practitioners will talk about how technology is developing to support big data applications, what it means to those who have to make them work, and the potential career impacts of the emerging field of data science.

This session will examine the current and near-term projected state of energy efficiency regulations in Japan, as well as provide an in-depth review of existing regulations for data center and other ITC equipment. In addition, this session will discuss new and proposed Japanese regulations (draft work is in progress), including revisions to existing programs that are anticipated to be initiated and/or completed in 2013. Finally, this session will review new areas of exploration that are likely to result in program revisions or additional regulations in 2014 and beyond.

The environmental impact, also called environmental footprint, of products and organizations is becoming a major topic driven by the needs of customer information, policy makers, and compliance towards regulation. Standards organizations, industry consortia, and regulatory bodies develop tools with the same goal: assessing the environmental impact of the product or the organization. However, each tool has its own specific interest range, life cycle stages, product ranges, and sometimes its own particular requirements.

Most of these methodologies for assessing environmental impacts can apply to a data center. The objective of The Green Grid aims to provide the industry with a framework and rules to describe the specificities of a data center, so that all the different methodologies can at least evaluate a data center in the same way. This common framework is intended to be used by owners, renters, and users of data centers in order to harmonize environmental studies.

This session will delve into Microsoft’s research and development of the first zero carbon data center, called the Data Plant. Located at the Dry Creek Water Reclamation Facility in Cheyenne, WY, this data center will be completely independent of the grid and will recycle common waste bi-products to sustainably power cloud services. Microsoft has been committed to developing more efficient and sustainable data center infrastructures that support the growing demand for online services since 1994. With this Data Plant pilot project, Microsoft is taking another step in that important journey, while also working to address some of the global challenges facing us all regarding energy, waste, and water resources today.

This session will offer an in depth review of the eBay Digital Service Efficiency (DSE) methodology. DSE is eBay's MPG for technical infrastructure. DSE connects technical infrastructure performance to top-level business metrics by measuring the key variables of revenue, cost, performance, and environmental impact based on user consumption of services provided. In addition, DSE tunes the infrastructure engine by identifying the knobs that can be adjusted at all levels, as well as optimizes effectiveness by striking a balance between the interconnected variables.

Exascale computing continues to drive requirements for data center power and cooling. Come hear customers and suppliers discuss the issues and solutions as The Green Grid and US CAS (U.S. Coalition for the Advancement of Supercomputing) bring this topic to the Forum.

Following the theme of ‘what would The Green Grid’s data center look like’ and based on the recently released white paper entitled, “An Integrated Approach to Operational Efficiency and Reliability,” this presentation will outline the chronological production of key operational documents throughout the facility lifecycle. In addition, this session will focus on the development of a facility-wide sequence of operations manuals that serve as the facility ‘run book’ for resource efficient, reliable operations.

Google’s data center practice helped develop the company’s competitive edge for online services and products. Now, nearly seven years after the first data center went into production, there is an ever increasing need to be creative in order to drive efficiency and minimize the impact on the planet. This presentation hopes to uncover some of Google’s early day decisions, why they were made and how those decisions led to future innovation. This session will also introduce how Google has integrated 10 guiding principles which have helped drive operational and financial efficiencies.

During this session, panelists will deliver an overview of SC39, as well as discuss, in detail, what it aims to deliver and when. Panelists will also discuss ISO standards that are likely to be delivered, and deliberate over what it would mean for the data center industry if regulators and governments across the world had ISO standards to reference.

In the annual members meeting, the President and Chairman of the Board, John Tuccillo, will discuss The Green Grid’s leadership in improving resource efficiency in IT and data centers through the development of resources and global collaboration with industry and government bodies. In addition, John will provide insight into the organization's status and future direction, as well as introduce The Green Grid's new Executive Director, Mark Schiller.

ICT offers the opportunity to address the threat of climate change while sustainably growing the world’s economies, but only if managed with the big picture in mind. Much more needs to be done to channel capital investments, deploy incentives for energy efficiency, and provide access to clean power to the ICT sector.

Hear how ICT provides a net reduction in GHG emissions within 6 industries, as detailed in the 2013 GeSI SMARTer 2020 report, and discover with NRDC how smart policy advocacy can help ICT become a bigger part of the solution

The conversation on resource efficient IT starts here! During this session, The Green Grid President and Chairman of the Board, John Tuccillo, will offer a brief introduction regarding The Green Grid and the role the organization plays in shaping the future of resource efficiency in IT and data centers. John will also discuss the agenda for The Green Grid's 6th annual Forum, highlighting sessions and networking opportunities.

This session offered an overview of The Green Grid, reviewed the accomplishments of the last year, and addressed the expanded mission and new initiatives. Vice-President Roger Tipley covered past activities, looked to the future, and answered questions from attendees. In addition, he introduced the new Executive Director, Mark Schiller, who discussed membership and participation opportunities.

Environmental impact, also called environmental footprint, of products and organizations is becoming a major topic driven by the need of customer information, policy makers, and compliance towards regulation. Standards organizations, industry consortia, and regulatory bodies develop tools with the same goal: assessing the environmental impact of the product or the organization. However, each tool has its own specific interest range, life cycle stages, product ranges, and sometimes its own particular requirements.

Most of these methodologies for assessing environmental impacts can apply to a data center. The objective of this TGG project is to provide the industry with a framework and rules to describe the specificities of a data center so that all the different methodologies can at least evaluate a data center in the same way. This common framework is intended to be used by owners, renters, and users of data centers in order to harmonize environmental studies.

Via five earlier white papers from The Green Grid, countless public presentations, articles, and global harmonization efforts, Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) has evolved from a simple fraction to a much more detailed description of how to instrument and analyze a data center's operations and infrastructure. The Green Grid recently released white paper #49, "PUE: A Comprehensive Examination of the Metric" as the single reference book for PUE. The Green Grid Vice President, Roger Tipley, was a content contributor to this "book" and he covered both the newly published PUE content, as well as refreshing everyone's memory about some of the older PUE material that may have been forgotten during the course of The Green Grid’s 6 years and 50+ white papers.

This session discussed The Green Grid’s recently released white paper, “Data Center Efficiency and IT Equipment Reliability at Wider Operating Temperature and Humidity Ranges.” Extending the environmental operating parameters of a data center is an accepted approach to reducing overall energy consumption. Relaxing tight control over temperature and humidity should result in less power required to cool the data center. However, the impact of increased data center operating temperature on IT equipment has historically been presumed to be detrimental to the equipment’s reliability and service availability.

In this session, Lex Coors discussed the Data Center Maturity Model (DCMM) which outlines capability descriptors by area such that users can understand their current performance, determine their levels of maturity, and identify the ongoing steps and innovations necessary to achieve greater energy efficiency and sustainability, both today and into the future. The maturity model touches upon every aspect of the data center including power, cooling, compute, storage and network.

In addition, Lex discussed how you can use the tool to assess your data center and IT portfolio against the DCMM, get access to your personal DCMM equalizer, and obtain benchmarking results – see how you are doing against the industry and similar types of data centers.

This session addressed data center metrics to measure resource efficiency in data centers. It gave the current status on the development of these metrics and on the progress made over the last few months. The Green Grid metrics that were discussed during this session include PUE, CUE, and WUE, as well as other industry proposed metrics such as FVER and the study on the proxies to measure efficiency of the IT systems. Lastly, this session addressed the integration of these metrics in the current works of the standardization organizations recognized by the World Trade Association such as the European groups Cen, Cenelec, ETSI or international groups IEC and ISO.

In this session, Roel Castelein, André Rouyer, David Snelling, and Michalis Grigoratos discussed current and recently completed activities of the EMEA Work Groups as well as future activities.

In this session, Paolo Bertoldi explored the European Commission's Code of Conduct on Data Centers' Energy Efficiency, which is comprised of a series of voluntary, light-touch measures. These measures are expected to form the basis of more stringent legislation in the future, laying out a set of minimum standards for compliance.

In this session, Colette Maloney offered an in depth look at EU initiatives, the roles of ICT in Europe, and Europe’s advancements in sustainable data centers, cloud computing, and new business opportunities through green-ICT. t group learned about various EU-Projects including GAMES, FIT4GREEN, ALL4GREEN, and CollEmAll.

With over 160 member companies worldwide, The Green Grid is rapidly advancing its mission to improve resource efficiency in information technology and data centers. During this final session, EMEA Technical Work Group Chair, Michalis Grigoratos, and Vice-Chair, Dr. David Snelling, provided an overview of how to get involved in The Green Grid’s activities.

This panel will address the various works being developed by international governments, standards organizations, and other institutions that are focused on the environmental impact of data centers, as well as driving the IT industry towards improved sustainability. Is it possible to harmonize the regulations on a global scale? Can we move beyond the current barriers of local energy policies and legal frameworks? These and other questions will be answered as participants from North America, Europe, and Asia review the current barriers to the global harmonization of resource efficient IT initiatives.

The first revision of the Data Center Design Guide has been published and defines a roadmap of capabilities for data center energy efficiency, including a path to realize holistic, policy based data center management. This session will provide an overview of the document and outline key concepts from the guide for data center equipment, management software, and interfaces.

Environmental impact, also called environmental footprint, of products and organizations is becoming a major topic driven by the need of customer information, policy makers, and compliance towards regulation. Standards organizations, industry consortia, and regulatory bodies develop tools with the same goal: assessing the environmental impact of the product or the organization. However, each tool has its own specific interest range, life cycle stages, product ranges, and sometimes its own particular requirements.

Most of these methodologies for assessing environmental impacts can apply to a data center. The objective of The Green Grid aims to provide the industry with a framework and rules to describe the specificities of a data center so that all the different methodologies can at least evaluate a data center in the same way. This common framework is intended to be used by owners, renters, and users of data centers in order to harmonize environmental studies.

As the data-driven economy drives the growth of data centers worldwide, we are facing unprecedented challenges of improving energy efficiency in data centers. Motivated by the very same drivers that are propelling the Smart Grid worldwide, the data center industry is going through a path breaking global transformation. Issues like reliability, cost of energy, green-house gases etc., have created an urgent need to look at data centers as an energy sink rather than purely a load, providing for interesting possibilities in the future. Looking at data centers as an "End Node" of the Smart Grid, this session will highlight the current trends in terms of opportunities, stakeholders, standards and barriers that are unique to increasing data center efficiencies. It will also provide representative examples and present considerations and recommendations in support of the establishment of sustainable data center initiatives globally. Interaction between the utility, as well as data centers and the impact of renewables and storage will also be addressed.

This session will provide an overview of the case study conducted by eBay as they implemented a metric-based approach to drive the design and construction of a new high efficiency data center. When eBay experienced the perfect storm of consolidation and growing demand for data center space in 2010, it took a holistic, end-to-end view of the space it was using, the servers it was deploying, and how its data centers were designed and operated. The approach that eBay followed sets an example of the benefits that can be achieved by utilizing The Green Grid’s Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric and by implementing the lessons of The Green Grid’s Data Center Maturity Model.

Energy security, energy prices and climate change have dramatically risen up the policy agenda, resulting in a comprehensive policy framework in many countries. The white paper “Energy Policy Research Policy Research and Implications for Data Centres in EMEA”, which was recently released by The Green Grid, takes a close look at existing and emerging international, EU-wide, and national sustainable energy policies in 12 EMEA countries which affect the build and operations of data centers. This session will present an overview of this research, focusing on:
• Regulatory obligations placed upon data centers operating in the country,
• Voluntary mechanisms within the country, with the impacts on reputation,
• Financial incentives available which target investment in low carbon technologies and practices, and
• Financial costs associated with energy and carbon which increase cost to users.

This presentation will address the different initiatives being taken at the European level by the European Commission and the European standardization organizations (ESOs) to reduce energy consumption and capture gas emissions for the ICT industry, and more specifically for data centers. This session will explain the challenges that have to be faced in Europe, the relationship between European directives and local country bills resulting in the "stick and the carrot" approach.

Within the frame of the Kyoto protocol, the “carrot” is used by institutions such as the JRC of the E.U. and the Code of Conduct with the goal to create mind share and drive stakeholders towards more efficient data centers. The “stick” will be more than likely used in a longer term basis by the E.C. parliament and DGs by the means of directives and carbon taxes that will force the data center industry to cut energy consumption and gas emissions.

Implementing a UPS’s “eco-mode” is a recommendation in the Data Center Maturity Model (DCMM) to improve data center efficiency and lower PUE. The energy efficiency gain and economic benefits of UPS eco-mode are provided, along with updates to the power distribution system efficiency (TGG WP#16).

This presentation explores in detail the application considerations for UPS eco-mode performance along with recommendations for other power distribution equipment (i.e. static switches) needed to ensure reliable power system.

The deployment of UPS eco-mode also requires an understanding of the power quality requirements of modern IT power supplies in servers, network, and storage equipment. This presentation provides updates on the latest voltage requirements for IT power supplies. Knowledge of the utility grid power quality is important to optimize UPS eco-mode operation and suggestions are provided for evaluating utility power quality.

This session will present an overview of the March 11, 2011 disaster in Japan including the damage caused by the earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear power plant shutdown which had severe implications on the Japanese power grid and data centers. The session will explain how data center managers in Japan responded to the power load peak and grid power shortage in the summer of 2011 with fast and innovative ways to improve energy efficiency. In addition, the session will feature a discussion on the future direction of data center management in Japan from an energy efficiency enhancement point of view.

This session presents a wide-ranging view of the impact that data centers are just beginning to have on society and business. Covering eons of information development in one hour, this session will identify key trends that will impact data centers, as well as discuss the reasons why data center mavericks must help rewrite the laws of economics with solutions that are business-wise and future-driven.

Facebook has completed the first phase of construction of a custom data center in Prineville, OR, and is currently constructing greenfield sites in Forest City, NC, and Lulea, Sweden. Previously, Facebook leased data center capacity, as is typical for internet startups. As demand continued to grow, it was clear that Facebook would reach a scale where design and construction of a customized site would be beneficial. Control of the application, the server configurations, and the data center design would allow for customization beyond what is typical industry practice. During the session, the following Open Compute Project technologies and topics will be discussed:
• Localized UPS
• Patent Pending Electrical Design
• Highly Efficient Evaporative Cooling System
• Elimination of Chillers and Ductwork
• Lessons Learned at Prineville and Forest City
• Future Design Considerations

This session will present the future of the Data Center Maturity Model (DCMM) and the newly created assessment tool. The tool allows you to assess your data center and IT portfolio against the DCMM, access your personal DCMM equalizer, and obtain benchmarking results – see how you are doing against the industry and similar types of data centers. The DCMM outlines capability descriptors by area such that users can understand their current performance, determine their levels of maturity, and identify the ongoing steps and innovations necessary to achieve greater energy efficiency and sustainability, both today and into the future. The maturity model touches upon every aspect of the data center including power, cooling, compute, storage, and network.

We don’t build data centers just because we want a cold place to store servers. We build them because we need a secure and reliable place to run and store applications and data. Unfortunately, the impact of applications and developers on energy efficiency in the data center is rarely discussed, even though increasing the utilization of the IT equipment from its typically low levels offers the biggest opportunity to improve the energy productivity of a data center. This panel of IT experts will discuss the emerging role of applications and developers in data center energy efficiency efforts. How can better designed and instrumented applications improve server utilization? What policies, incentives, and technologies are needed to motivate developers to create applications that are both reliable and efficient? What’s the role of private and public clouds, and what are some of the longer term opportunities that, with the help of developers, can make data centers more energy efficient, more productive, and friendlier to the environment than ever before?

Survey Results: Energy Efficiency of Japanese Data Centers During this session, The Green IT Promotion Council (GPIC) will review the results of the 2012 and 2011 survey on Energy Efficiency of Japanese Data Centers conducted by The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) of Japan. The survey included data centers in Singapore and Vietnam, and measured not only energy efficiency in facilities, but also energy productivity of IT equipment in data centers. As a result of collaboration with The Green Grid, GPIC has developed a holistic approach to viewing energy efficiency in data centers.

Japanese Data Centers: How they kept running even after the earthquake Although the March 2011 earthquakes struck a wide area of eastern Japan, data centers and its related industry showed impressive continuity of operations and business. This session will explain the real events seen and experienced by the actual data center business operator, sharing lessons learned, while introducing unique anti-disaster technology developed and adopted by Japanese data center operators. The remainder of the session will focus on the opportunities and potential of Japanese data centers in terms of its market status with energy efficient-technology widely used in Japanese data centers. In addition, some Japan Data Center Council (JDCC) activities example (sub working group) will be presented.

Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) has been a rallying point for improving data center infrastructure efficiency. This session will feature panelists from companies that have translated PUE measurements into business value. Each panelist will discuss PUE results obtained and the business value derived from those results.

In addition, many companies have extended resource efficiency innovation beyond PUE measurements. Panelists who have helped shape innovation around data center efficiency will discuss specific steps taken by their organizations and how those results contributed to their bottom-line.

In this session, The President and Chairman of the Board will take a deeper look at the key drivers which are propelling the demand for greater resource efficient IT. He will discuss how The Green Grid through its own efforts and collaboration with Liaison organizations globally is meeting the challenge and charting the direction for even greater improvement in years to come.

In the beginning there was PUE, now, as the range of metrics is expanding, we will look at CUE and WUE. These two new metrics, modeled after the successful PUE metric, will be reviewed in the context of how to improve your data center operations. A brief background review of metric development and definition will be followed by detailed discussions of how CUE and WUE can be used in all aspects of the data center life-cycle. The benefits and advantages to beginning their use now will be discussed, particularly in light of the growing awareness of the need for sustainable data center operations.

In 2004, ASHRAE published the first vendor neutral temperature standards, which established a recommended range of 68 to 77 °F (20 to 25 °C) and indicated that the temperatures were to be measured at the IT equipment air inlet. Prior to that, the air temperatures were more based on anecdotal knowledge and worst case scenario (often 68 °F, 20 °C). It is hard to believe that the recommended air temperature range has widened from 64 to 81 °F (18 to 27 °C) in less than 10 years. Further, there are allowable ranges that go as wide as 41 to 113 °F (5 to 45 °C). There are also radical changes in the humidity ranges.

The net result is a wide range of opportunities throughout the world for more economical and reliable cooling solutions, including compressor-less cooling. ASHRAE has also created water temperature classes for liquid cooled equipment. This presentation provides critical insight into these groundbreaking environmental class changes and some critical aspects of the associated decisions.

This collaborative session will highlight and discuss the work that has been negotiated and outlined between The Green Grid, DMTF, and Ecma. The outputs of this work are the CIM Profiles for power and cooling to support The Green Grid management infrastructure initiative.

Availability is a key design criterion for data centers. The tier levels introduced by the Uptime Institute represent industry typical system configurations (N, N+1, N+N, etc.). The tiers convey mental images of comparative power system architecture availability and their relative reliability, maintainability, and efficiency levels for AC powered data centers. Standards organizations such as TIA and BICSI have also adopted the notion of availability levels to convey basic design configuration feature sets of AC powered data centers. With the growing interest in DC power solutions for data centers, obvious questions are being asked about similar availability level configurations for direct current power configurations. This presentation will offer a qualitative overview comparison of AC and DC power reliability architectures using industry best practices performance feature design guidelines.

The IT industry is undergoing a transformation the like of which we have not seen since the introduction of distributed computing and personal computers. The evolution of cloud computing, the expanding influence of social networking, the conversion to a modernized electric grid, and the introduction of big data into new disciplines are fundamentally changing the delivery models, business models, and operational models for IT services. Meanwhile, the world around us is changing at an unprecedented pace - from global economic turmoil, to climate change, to socio-political unrest, to natural resource depletion. How might this play out in the corporate computing ecosystem? What will the equivalent of the data center look like in 2025? This panel will share their thoughts on how jobs, technology, and industry will change over the next 10-12 years.

The Green Grid is creating a set of metrics to allow all facets of data center efficiency to be measured. This started with power and cooling efficiency through the use of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and has since moved into looking at individual components within IT devices used in the data center. The first of these was Data Center Compute Efficiency (DCcE), which shows the efficiency of the use of compute resources in the data center.

This session expands on that vision with the next set of metrics – Data Center Storage Efficiency (DCsE) – which are designed to help data center operators determine the energy efficiency of their storage resources and identify inefficiencies. Using the DCsE metrics, data center operators can continually refine and increase the energy efficiency of their storage resources in the same way that they use PUE to improve data center infrastructure energy efficiency. This session will cover how you can measure DCsE metrics and utilize that information to drive storage strategy that increases the energy efficiency of your data centers over time.

Over the past several years, the data center facilities industry has begun a significant transformation. In this transformation, traditional perceptions of data center facilities as multi-year, site-constructed, low-density buildings are shifting toward viewing them as conceived and constructed from a modular, flexible, and certainly more rapidly deployable set of solutions. Within this latter view are solutions that include not only containerized platforms, but also modular, pre-engineered, and prefabricated building blocks. When deployed and integrated with the required mechanical, electrical, and related services, these building blocks come together and enable the end user to realize a complete data center facility, which can be rapidly deployed, achieve lower operating and capital costs, and be equipped with higher density and energy-savings targets. This session will discuss how Containerized/Modular Data Center Facilities architecture has become an increasingly viable and robust alternative when considering a data center build, with multiple implementation approaches from various suppliers in the industry.

This session will present an overview of the newly proposed Electronics Disposal Efficiency (EDE) metric, which is designed to help increase industry awareness regarding the responsible disposal of IT assets. By providing a simple, easy to use metric, The Green Grid believes that organizations will be able to measure themselves and set goals to improve how they dispose of IT assets. The EDE metric complements the Data Center Maturity Model, which contains clear goals and direction for improving energy efficiency and sustainability throughout a data center.

The Green Grid Technology and Strategy Work Group actively pursues tools and information on energy saving technologies which will help operators run data centers more efficiently. This session will include discussions on the free cooling maps and economizers, the synergy between them, as well as review the latest ASHRAE thermal guideline updates, and the results of The Green Grid’s latest survey on economizer use. Recommendations for the future will be shared on how to further improve efficiencies using the latest tools and data set from The Green Grid.

During this ceremony, The Green Grid will recognize the 2011 recipients of The Green Grid Key Contributor Award. In addition, current and former members of the Board of Directors and Advisory Council will be acknowledged for their contributions as the organization celebrates its 5th anniversary!

Continued population growth, coupled with increased per capita consumption of natural resources will require a holistic perspective in addressing sustainability. As environmental risks increase, and regulatory schemes that seek to address many of the externalities are imposed, consumers and producers will be forced to internalize the environmental costs associated with their consumption and production. Historically, many businesses have assumed a reactive stance towards environmental concerns, mitigating impacts as a secondary concern to their underlying operating model. However, moving forward, those businesses which assume a proactive stance in anticipating, internalizing, and mitigating future risks will increasingly obtain a differentiable advantage.

The necessary transformation for a business and society can be delivered by a sustainable IT ecosystem that enables advanced measurement, communication, and computation for improved management of resources at the enterprise and city scales. However, such a transformation necessitates addressing sustainability with a holistic supply and demand side perspective. The supply side perspective necessitates using local resources of available energy, exploiting availability in waste streams and performing design and management that minimizes the available energy required to extract, manufacture, mitigate waste, transport, operate and reclaim components. The demand side perspective requires provisioning resources based on the needs of the user by using flexible building blocks, pervasive sensing, communications, knowledge discovery, and policy based control.

This session will apply the supply-demand perspective to show how we can drive data centers towards “net zero”, and apply them to scale out services that can enable management of resources at broader campus and city scales. The call to action, given the exciting opportunity to apply sustainable IT in the broader cyber-physical space, is to take the lead in developing a holistic metric and in building a global multidisciplinary workforce to tackle these large-scale challenges.

The Green Grid introduced the Data Center Energy Productivity (DCeP) metric to track the overall work product of a data center per unit of energy used to produce that work. Since DCeP can be difficult to implement, we proposed eight productivity proxies that would be used as simple indicators of productivity. Last year, The Green Grid performed a validation study at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to evaluate the ease of use and accuracy of the proxies. This session will present the results of the validation study, examine measuring productivity in the context of the DCMM, and discuss future direction.

Following its study on the adoption of Server Power Management, The Green Grid concluded that greater industry awareness and education would help speed use of these technologies. Accordingly, TGG initiated an effort in 2011 to create an online TGG Academy module called “Server Power Management 101”. This module is now complete and it’s time for TGG’s community to help answer the question: “What’s next?”

This panel discussion will briefly review the findings of the original study and introduce the audience to the new module. It will then engage the audience in a discussion of future activities. What is the opportunity for Server Power Management in the data center? Should The Green Grid consider the development of a more prescriptive module: “Server Power Management 201”? Are there other deliverables that would better accelerate the use of these technologies?

Interest in High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) power in data centers has gone up and down over the years. With the Electric Power Research Institute's (EPRI) report released in 2011 on the efficiency gains to be made with DC power distribution, the question on some end users' minds is, "How ready is the rest of the industry for HVDC?" This panel will include members of the system and facilities vendor community, researchers, and end users who will look at the state of the art in HVDC in terms of the latest research results, practical applications, and pitfalls of AC and DC power systems in the data center. The panel will also address attendee questions in this interesting topic area.

Happy Birthday! The Green Grid has had a record year marking its 5th anniversary! In this session, the President and Chairman of the Board will be joined by the Executive Director to recap The Green Grid’s key milestones and discuss how the organization’s "global community of collaboration" continues to meet and in many cases outpace the demands for resource efficient IT.

One year ago, The Green Grid expanded its mission to become the global authority on resource efficient data centers and business computing ecosystems. In recognition of accelerating demands, self-improvement opportunities, and the increased attention of governmental policy makers globally, the President and Chairman of the Board will offer a brief introduction as to how The Green Grid is delivering upon the key principles of this commitment, such as how to address the business case and the environmental sustainability benefits that resource efficient IT provides all industries, and how The Green Grid continues driving forward.

Following the natural disaster in Japan on 11 March 2011, the country’s nuclear power issues and entire electrical power scheme were changed. For data centres, many tools and methods recommended by The Green Grid were put into practice and the reduced power consumption by data centres provided good results. This session discussed the future of the power scheme in Japan, and the efforts in progress by the data centre owners and operators.

This session presented the work of the Data Centre Life Cycle Analysis Task Force. The objective of the data centre life cycle analysis study is not to provide numbers, but to first present a formal framework based on international standards to conduct data centre life cycle analysis, then to identify existing studies dealing with environmental aspects of data centres or components of data centres and finally to make a proposal for future studies to get as close as possible to a complete data centre life cycle analysis.

This session presented the future of The Green Grid’s Data Centre Maturity Model (DCMM) and the newly created assessment tool. The tool allows you to assess your data centre and IT portfolio against the DCMM, get access to your personal DCMM equalizer, and obtain benchmarking results. The DCMM touches upon every aspect of the data centre including power, cooling, compute, storage, and network. The levels of the model outline current best practices and a five year roadmap for the industry.

In this session, Harqs Singh, André Rouyer and David Snelling highlighted the progress that the EMEA Work Groups and Committees have made in the past year, reviewed current projects, and offered a preview of future activities.

The session addressed the current status on the liaisons that The Green Grid has developed in EMEA and the corresponding works in progress. It particularly focused on the new initiatives being taken by the European Commission as far as capturing carbon emissions and measuring energy efficiency in the ICT world in which the data centre industry and The Green Grid are playing a major role. This session also included a discussion on a new glossary wiki of common terms for the data centre industry. This glossary was created in order to establish common terminology for data centres.

In September of 2009, The Green Grid and its Operations Work Group accepted the opportunity to study the impact of energy efficiency improvements in a member company’s data centre. The purpose of the study is to provide operators with a set of The Green Grid endorsed improvement metrics and ROI models intended to assist data centre operators with building credible business cases for performing energy efficiency improvements.

Raising the data centre operating temperature increases the number of hours and days a year that economizers can be used, reducing operating costs. Though what effect does this have on the reliability and energy consumption of the IT equipment itself? This session looked at the scope for increasing inlet temperatures, the effect on IT equipment, and what ASHRAE has to say on the subject.

This session offered an overview of The Green Grid, reviewed the accomplishments of the last year, and addressed the expanded mission and new directions that The Green Grid unveiled at the 2011 US Technical Forum. Executive Director Mark Monroe covered the past, looked to the future, and answered questions from attendees.

Deutsche Bank Group presentation on "Banking on Fresh AirEco Data Centre New York"

"To meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Brundtland 1987). This is the goal of sustainable development. France has developed several initiatives on this basis from the constitutional charter on the environment in March 2005 to the “Grenelle” laws voted in 2007 and 2010. The “Grenelle process” was totally new for French government and will strongly impact the French economy and business, beyond the strong breakthrough concerning the State organization and regulations.

Recently The Green Grid announced the creation of two new metrics designed to help improve the sustainability of data center facilities by measuring the effectiveness of carbon and water use tied specifically to the IT energy infrastructure they contain. The new metrics, Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE™) and the Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE™), are joining The Green Grid’s widely-used Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric. All are designed to help IT, facilities, and sustainability organizations across the globe optimize their data centers. This will be a facilitated discussion among a panel of contributors who co-authored CUE and WUE and the audience. The panel and audience will have an interactive session where we explore the benefits and challenges of the new metrics.

The Green Grid has released several metrics over the past few years targeting specific areas of data center energy efficiency. This session will be a panel of co-authors for the released metrics PUE, ERE, DCcE, and the soon to be released Partial PUE. The presenters will provide an introduction and current status to each metric and will reserve time for an interactive audience discussion.

The U.S. Department of Energy and Lawrence Berkley National Labs created a training program for Data Center Practitioners to review first level energy efficiency assessments of their data centers. The Green Grid has created an Excel based assessment tool to be used as the IT module of the program. This presentation will cover the status of the tool and several of the key features. The second half of this session provides a brief overview and progress report on the DCEP program. The data center industry and DOE have partnered to develop a certificate process leading to energy practitioners qualified to evaluate the energy status and efficiency opportunities in data centers. The key objective is to raise the standards of those involved in energy assessments to accelerate energy savings in the dynamic and energy-intensive marketplace of data centers. The practitioners are trained to provide a consistent approach through system-level energy assessments. They have documented knowledge and skills including proficiency in the use of the DC Pro Software Tool Suite. Target groups for participating in the program include data center personnel (in-house expertise) and consulting professionals (for-fee consulting). After a number of pilot training events in 2010, the program will be offered world-wide in 2011.

A recent survey conducted by The Green Grid revealed four-fifths of data center operators are not looking for unused servers as part of regular operations. Those who do, find on average 10% of their servers are running without being used. This session investigates the cost of wasteful servers and why ignoring them can put the ROI of virtualization at risk. Also explained are new approaches to monitoring servers, where power and usage measurements are combined with business value to shine a spotlight on a hidden problem within the data center.

For years you have heard of the impending release of the ENERGY STAR rating and label for data centers. This presentation will report on the first six months of use since the release of the rating in June 2010, and will also highlight opportunities for data center operators to leverage the value of the ENERGY STAR label and brand to benefit their operations. First, we’ll recap the history of the rating development. Next will be a review of use since its release, with highlights of the more than half-dozen data centers that have already earned the ENERGY STAR label. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of the value of the ENERGY STAR label to data center operators, as well as the growing number of mandatory benchmarking laws that will impact data center operators.

This session will review the progress and current status specific to the Global Harmonization of Metrics effort. In 2009 The Green Grid in collaboration with organizations around the globe began driving toward a set of metrics and indices which can be formally adopted by all participant organizations to improve data center energy efficiency globally. Groups participating in this effort are the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the European Union Code of Conduct, Japan’s Green IT Promotion Council, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and various additional industry groups.

Regulators around the world are taking aim at IT in general, and data centers in particular, in their efforts to regulate reduced energy use and carbon emissions. But at the end of the day, we need more IT and innovation, not less. Rob Atkinson will discuss why policy makers should be concentrating on spurring digital transformation – incentivizing conversion of energy intensive atoms to energy savings bits and why spurring fundamental clean energy R&D, rather than regulating IT efficiency, is the surer path to the needed low carbon global economy.

As The Green Grid closes in on its fifth year, there is significant achievement, expansion, and change for the organization. This session reviews some of the accomplishments of the last year, and covers the annual user meeting requirements, but more importantly addresses the expanded mission and new directions that The Green Grid will pursue in the coming months. With input from the Advisory Council, the organization will unveil and examine the exciting new charter. Chair of the Board and President John Tuccillo and new Executive Director Mark Monroe will cover the past, look to the future, and answer questions from attendees.

This presentation reviews the critical element considerations of site selection criteria for new construction and collocation hosting facilities. Additionally, it demonstrates the necessity to elevate the priority of sustainability as a new and critical element in site selection; proposes how the utilization of the current and future tools and metrics of The Green Grid can aid the owner/operator, consultant, and manufacturer in successfully choosing locations that can promote efficiency and sustainability; and invites participation into the development of these best practices and tools. 

What are the latest issues, concerns, trends, and requests from data centers? Data Center Pulse, a non-profit group of thousands data center owners and operators spanning 66 countries, will be hosting their annual summit the day before The Green Grid Technical Forum in Santa Clara, CA. This working session will produce real time content to update the DCP Top Ten list. The Top 10 will be presented and discussed at The Green Grid forum as part of the collaboration agreement between Data Center Pulse and The Green Grid.

The Green Grid defined the Data Center energy Productivity (DCeP) metric to quantify the useful work that a data center produces based on the amount of energy it consumes. This metric intends to allow data center operators the ability to optimize the energy used based on the current workload and to facilitate comparisons before and after actions are taken. The Green Grid proposed eight proxies that could be used to approximate DCeP and solicited industry feedback to determine the criteria to use to evaluate the proxies. In this session, the presenter will review the proposed proxies to measure productivity and present a preliminary assessment of the top five evaluation criteria. The session will also cover experimental validation of the proxies that The Green Grid is conducting to assess ease-of-use and accuracy.

Utility incentives can help bring Green IT within financial reach for savvy organizations who know how to leverage them, but finding and acquiring these funds can be confusing, time consuming, and even perilous. This session brings utility energy efficiency experts together with seasoned data center architects to share experiences, tips and tricks on getting the most support possible for IT energy efficiency investments, answering questions such as:
• How do I find out what incentives are available?
• How can I influence what utilities will fund?
• What is the best way to accelerate funding / sidestep bureaucracy / cut paperwork?

The Data Center Design Guide (DCDG) outlines and identifies a new architectural approach to how we build and modernize data centers focusing on energy efficiency, and how to move forward towards a coordinated holistic, single pane, policy based management for the entire data center.  The DCDG has been drafted by a Work Group within the Technical Committee and is ready for wider Industry review and comment. During the next summer, comments and inputs will be incorporated to finalize the document. This session will cover the main tenants and objectives of the Design Guide, document outline, outstanding items still to be closed and how user can use the guide to define a capabilities roadmap for future data center builds and equipment purchase discussions and decisions.  The session will also provide an overview of the management infrastructure initiative within The Green Grid.  The overview includes objectives, strategies, key concepts, and directions relevant to the initiative. It also describes the technical specifications and similar collateral under development by The Green Grid, implications to adopters, and future expectations. This presentation covers both power and cooling domains.

This session will cover the use of Intel’s Energy Checker SDK to instrument applications for productivity.  Content will include an overview of the goals of the Energy Checker SDK, how to use Energy Checker SDK to measure data center productivity (productive work vs. power), and the relationship to The Green Grid’s efforts of the Data Center Design Guide.            

Historically data centers, considered process cooling, have been exempt from previous editions of the 90.1 Standard. However, with increasing data center energy consumption and focus on building efficiency this exempt status has been removed as of the 2010 edition. Economizers are among the more significant implications from loss of exempt status. Depending upon geographic location and size an economizer system may now be required for data center cooling solution. The standard recognizes two distinct methods of economization: air economizers and water economizers.

This work provides a high level summary of compliance paths for Section 6 “Heating, Ventilating and Air-Conditioning,” along with various economizer requirements as they relate specifically to the data centers. Items to be covered include: exemptions, air economizer performance and water economizer performance. These mandates warrant careful consideration during: planning, design, building, and commissioning of new data centers or significant expansion of existing data centers.

During this session, the results and findings of the recently completed ASHRAE2008 Deployment status survey will be presented along with a recommendation for action. In the latter half of the session, the case studies of Fujitsu’s and Hitachi’s data center efficiency improvements will be discussed.

Observers of U.S. energy policy might think of energy efficiency as a useful tool to manage the growth of our nation’s energy consumption. They might also see it as a cost-effective means to ease our transition into a post-carbon world. And yes, the evidence does support both of these notions. But the U.S. economy now wastes 87 percent of the energy it uses, and regulators tend to focus their efforts on waste management, rather than on avoiding waste in the first place. There is an emerging body of evidence which compels a significantly greater attention to the critical role of energy efficiency in maintaining a productive and a more prosperous economy. The Green Grid, and semiconductor and information and communication technologies (ICT) more broadly, will be among the surprising opportunities that can enable higher levels of productivity – should we choose to invest in those resources.

Containerized or Modular Data Center Facilities can save time and money and increase business flexibility, but there are common issues that need to be thought about in new ways. This session will be an overview of the topics to be covered in an upcoming white paper including site selection, service access, lifecycle and refresh, insurability and certification, local code issues, and many more. This presentation is an opportunity to hear from and ask questions of the presenters who have direct experience delivering these types of facilities.

This session will introduce The Green Grid’s new Data Center Maturity Model (DCMM) which  touches upon every aspect of the data center including power, cooling, compute, storage, and network. The levels of the model outline current best practice and a five year roadmap for the industry. The DCMM provides capability descriptions by data center area so that operators can benchmark their current performance, determine their levels of maturity, and identify the ongoing steps and innovations necessary to achieve greater energy efficiency and sustainability, both today and into the future.

This session will provide an update on the state of the different ENERGY STAR programs for data center equipment.  It will also bring participants up to date on the structural changes that were introduced to ENERGY STAR product-based programs during 2010.

This session will discuss the recently updated EU Code of Conduct (EU CoC) for Data Centers. This document was originally created by the European Commission Joint Research Centre in 2008 in response to increasing energy consumption in data centers and the need to reduce the related environmental, economic, and energy supply security impacts. The EU CoC aims to inform and stimulate data center operators and owners to reduce energy consumption in a cost-effective manner without hampering the mission critical function of data centers. The EU CoC aims to achieve this by improving understanding of energy demand within the data center, raising awareness, and recommending energy efficient best practice and targets. The EU CoC recently been updated for the second version of the document. The Green Grid participated in this review process with the goal to provide comments back to the Joint Research Centre.

In this session a representative of the Thermal Management Sub Work Group will report out on their just-published white paper on the range of cooling architectures. In this comprehensive study the qualitative aspects of various cooling strategies are reviewed. This includes attributes such as current usage and availability, efficiency, reliability, equipment architectures, and standardization and acceptance. The architectural strategies are looked at in different levels from air-flow management, to equipment placement, to heat rejection. The session will also cover differences in air and water cooling and provide attendees with the latest information on the advantages and disadvantages of cooling architectures.

In the industry today, there is an an increasing need for education around the management of power utilization and consumption. Today's servers, at the core of the data center, foster new and advanced opportunities for efficient application and use within today's IT environment. With a better understanding of these opportunities, the concept of Server Power Management has the potential to become the ideal process for regulating power use. For data center personnel, building the knowledge base of the technology and the impact Server Power Management has on operating and capital expenses, lends itself to a more efficient and effective application of power management policy, within the organization and the industry. This session will focus on the basics of Server Power Management: the benefits of power management, the hierarchy of power management, the opportunities the learner has to manage power, and the learner's ability to do so.

Are utilities wasting ratepayer money on incentives for server virtualization? The ultimate answer will impact the level of support utilities give IT and data center efficiency in the near future, just as the hard work of reaching the SMB reaches a crucial phase. This session explores server virtualization through a utility lens, offering a case study The Green Grid can use to better understand the pitfalls, challenges, and opportunities that come with helping utilities encourage end users to invest in efficiency.

As The Green Grid closes in on its fifth year, there is significant achievement, expansion, and change for the organization. This session reviews some of the accomplishments of the last year, and covers the annual user meeting requirements, but more importantly addresses the expanded mission and new directions that The Green Grid will pursue in the coming months. With input from the end user Advisory Council, the organization will unveil and examine the exciting new charter. Chairman of the Board and President John Tuccillo and new Executive Director Mark Monroe will cover the past, look to the future, and answer questions from attendees.

In September of 2009, The Green Grid and its Operations Work Group accepted the opportunity to study the impact of energy efficiency improvements in a member’s data center. The purpose of the study is to provide operators a set of The Green Grid endorsed improvement metrics and ROI models intended to assist data center operators with building credible business cases for performing energy efficiency improvements. This session reveals the findings of this specific case study, insight into the journey and analysis, and lessons learned.

Over the past several years, server vendors added a number of features to their products aimed at understanding and reducing server power consumption. These range from relatively simple measuring and monitoring features to more complex functions regulating situational power use. Anecdotal evidence from the field, however, suggests that, despite the potential for these features to reduce power consumption, operating expenses, and heat loads, end-users have been slot to adopt and leverage. This session will report on the findings of the Server Power Features Task Force: the obstacles inhibiting adoption, a potential roadmap for TGG, and the industry at-large to remove these inhibitors.

Presented at The Green Grid EMEA Technical Forum in London on December 16, 2010.

Presented at The Green Grid EMEA Technical Forum held in London on December 16, 2010.

Presented at The Green Grid EMEA Technial Forum in London on December 16, 2010.

DC Building Power Asia '10 included an informal exhibition featuring equipment, materials, and literature. At the event The Green Grid also gave a presentation on "Issues to Consider for Higher Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) Data Centers."

Presented at the EMEA Technical Forum held in Paris, France on 2 December 2010.

Presented at the EMEA Technical Forums held in Europe in November and December 2010.

Presented at the EMEA Technical Forum held in Paris on 2 December 2010.

Presented at the EMEA Technical Forums held in Europe in November and December 2010.

Presented at the EMEA Technical Forums held in Europe in November and December 2010.

Presented at the EMEA Technical Forum held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands on 30 November 2010.

Presented at the EMEA Technical Forum held in Amsterdam on 30 November 2010.

Presented at the EMEA Technical Forums held in Europe in November and December 2010.

Presented at the EMEA Technical Forums held in Europe in November and December 2010.

Presented at the EMEA Technical Forums held in Europe in November and December 2010.

During The Green Grid EMEA Webinar, leaders of the EMEA Technical and Communications Work Groups discussed The Green Grid’s latest technical deliverables and provided an overview of the materials presented during the public portion of The Green Grid’s 2010 Technical Forum. Webinar attendees learned about opportunities to become more efficient in managing their most important computing infrastructure and identify methods that lower costs and support global sustainability initiatives. This regionally focused webinar also highlighted current legislative trends, activities and regional tools specific to EMEA.

The energy savings gained from server and storage virtualization and consolidation can be further maximized if data center managers adjust their power and cooling infrastructure to accommodate the reduced loads. The cycle of initial reduced load followed by load growth should incorporate adjustments to power and cooling. This presentation examines several approaches for efficiently cooling consolidated loads.

In this session, representatives from the Advisory Council will share the readout results of the 2009 BOF session and provide the updated "top 10" from Data Center Pulse. Additionally, Data Center Pulse’s "Chill Off 3", an industry test comparing efficiencies of different cooling products in the data center will be introduced to forum attendees.

ENERGY STAR is a government program designed to help businesses and organizations save energy and fight global warming with superior energy efficiency. This session will provide a brief introduction of the ENERGY STAR program offerings for commercial and industrial organizations, including the new rating system for data centers.

This session will review the work performed to assess an EPA data center in Washington, D.C., the results of that assessment, and the challenges and opportunities for this type of an installation. Many of the lessons learned by both the EPA and the assessment team will be shared.

The Green Grid free cooling map and web tool was introduced at the 2009 Technical Forum with a promise that suggestions for enhancements were welcome and would be enacted. This year, The Green Grid free cooling maps and tools have been updated to include maps of Europe and Japan, and the web tool has been enhanced to include common practices in economization, such as return air mixing and humidification. The Power Configuration Efficiency Estimator presentation is the first introduction of the tool to general users and will touch on the major features of the tool.

During this session, representatives from the United States Department of Energy, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and the European Union Commission will discuss not only the current status of regulatory and legislative initiatives focusing on data center efficiency, but potential near-term future implications as well.

This session will present a brief overview of the first online tools and other tools available in the industry as background for an interactive discussion on where The Green Grid’s Technical Committee should focus tool-related efforts in 2010. The discussion will include not only facility-related issues, but also how best to provide guidance to individuals and groups responsible for IT decisions that affect power consumption and energy efficiency.

Last year, The Green Grid introduced the concept of measuring data center productivity through the use of proxies: simplified metrics that closely indicate the amount of real work done in data centers without the expense and difficulty of measuring work directly. This year, results of the feedback surveys are analyzed, progress on the metrics is discussed, and directions for the coming year are explained.

Power & Cooling, and by association energy efficiency, are widely accepted as the top concerns of many data center owners/operators today. As a result, there is an industry-wide push to improve data center energy efficiency.

During this time of unprecedented change in the global economy, the positive economic and ecologic values of energy efficiency has moved to the front of the global stage. The ongoing work of The Green Grid continues to offer valuable foundational as well as forward-looking materials to aggressively advance energy efficient IT globally.

In this session, The Green Grid Academy, we will introduce highlights and objectives of our latest released course titled, "Recovery Stranded Data Center Capacity". Attendees will also discuss their impressions of The Green Grid’s Brandon Hall award-winning eLearning "Measures and Metrics" course. Based on the group’s feedback, the presenter will introduce 2010 plans including the creation and charter of the newly formed Education Committee.

The goal of the Data Center Design Guide program is to provide the industry with a set of design guides to be used by operators and designers to build and operate energy efficient data centers. The presentation will describe the status of the program, examples of the first drafted chapters, and discuss next steps in completing the first complete draft of the Design Guide.

This session explores the problem of unused servers. Whether they’re running old applications with no users, used briefly and then abandoned, or even never used, it’s all a waste of energy which can easily be avoided with tools and guidance. This session will discuss the results of the survey that was given and conclusions that can be drawn from it.

During this session, CSCI will review recent activities associated with the program goals as well as planned technical activities for 2010. In addition, the talk will address opportunities for synergy and collaboration between CSCI and TGG.

This session will review ongoing work within The Green Grid and select national labs on developing a metric for measuring the benefit of reusing excess or waste energy from the data center.

The measuring and management of the PUE for an IT facility is an effective tool in the overall management of the energy use of a facility. While PUE is a valuable tool, it can be used inappropriately.

Electric utilities know that efficient IT equipment presents a major energy savings opportunity but very few offer targeted incentives for energy efficient IT products. Utilities should have a role in promoting a greener high-tech industry but face barriers which inhibit their meaningful participation.

The DOE Save Energy Now Program is collaborating with The Green Grid and other industry groups to develop a Data Center Certified Energy Practitioner (DC-CEP) Program to accelerate energy savings in the dynamic and energy intensive marketplace of data centers.

In 2009, The Green Grid conducted surveys in North America and Japan to better understand how data centers are measuring energy consumption, the challenges they encounter and the actions they take when they learn more about their energy efficiency. This presentation will detail some of the survey’s most significant results and what data center operators indicated regarding the current and potential future state of data center energy efficiency.

This presentation will describe the design bases and input being provided to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the development and release of the IT module of the follow-on DCPro Assessment Tool. The presentation will provide a tour of the spreadsheet tool created by The Green Grid to deliver the requested input, design bases, and assessment process for the DCPro IT Module. This presentation is also to acknowledge and thank SNIA, ASHRAE, and other member companies for their input and assistance.

This Code of Conduct (CoC) was created by the European Commission Joint Research Centre in 2008 in response to increasing energy consumption in data centers and the need to reduce the related environmental, economic, and energy supply security impacts.

This session will review the progress and current status specific to the Global Harmonization of Metrics effort. In 2009 The Green Grid in collaboration with the following organizations began driving toward a set of metrics and indices which can be formally adopted by all participant organizations to improve data center energy efficiency globally.

The Annual Members Meeting will be lead by Larry Vertal, Executive Director of The Green Grid. This meeting will include organizational information and updates about the current status of The Green Grid. Following the meeting, recipients of the newly established Key Contributor Award will be recognized for their contributions to The Green Grid.

Higher Voltage Direct Current (HVdc) power in the data center is a hot topic in the industry and numerous discussion papers have been published, including several by The Green Grid. Broad deployment of HVdc is becoming more possible, but many obstacles and issues still need to be addressed before HVdc can be a viable solution for a broader set of end users.

In light of the recent Environmental Protection Agency announcement to support the PUE metric as the foundation for the Data Center Energy Star Rating system, this session will briefly outline the previous PUE/DCiE publications, the current progress within The Green Grid respective to PUE/DCiE, and the future developments that will be released in 2010.

PUE is an important data center metric. An online tool has been developed that will assist in the proper estimation of the static design-level PUE.

During this first part of this session the presenter will provide a review of the published PUE/DCiE Usage and Public Reporting Guidelines, an overview of The Green Grid PUE reporting database forms and a discussion on potential recognition programs.
During the second part of the sesion, the presenter will discuss The Green Grid’s efforts to develop a database for recording key data center information as well as measurement results and contextual information about those results.

This session reviews the events affecting our members and the data center industry in EMEA, including the carbon trading landscape and how this is likely to affect other geographies and countries going forward. Also covered are the EMEA Technical Work Group plans for 2010, the updated version of the EU Code of Conduct on Data Center Efficiency and the liaison with the British Computing Society. Also, in addition, the presenters will preview plans for connecting with the myriad of other energy efficiency bodies moving forward.

This session will include Japan Communications Work Group and Technical Work Group activity updates including 2009 accomplishments, a Japan organizational update, annual Japan events report, technical activities status, and the 2010 activity plan.

During this time of unprecedented change in the global economy, the positive economic and ecologic values of energy efficiency has moved to the front of the global stage. The ongoing work of The Green Grid continues to offer valuable foundational as well as forward-looking materials to aggressively advance energy efficient IT globally.

This session will provide an overview of the Liaison Committee and discuss Alliances in the IT, Facilities, and Government sectors. Representatives from ASHRAE, BCS, DMTF, GIPC, and SNIA will present a synopsis of their relationship with The Green Grid and key deliverables that are in development.

Digital Realty Trust developed an End User presentation describing the use of DCiE and PUE as Metrics to improve energy efficiency at their company.

Desribes the Data Centre Code of Conduct, how to participate, and the annual review.

Presented at the EMEA Technical Forums held in Europe in October.

The State of The Green Grid was presented at the four EMEA Technical Forums held in Europe in October.

STRATO developed an End User presentation describing the methods of boosting energy efficiency at their company.

Presented at the EMEA Technical Forums held in Europe in October.

Speakers: John Tuccillo, APC
Mark Monroe, Sun Microsystems

The goal of this data center design guide will be to provide the industry with a set of design guidelines to be used by operators and designers to build and operate energy efficient data centers. The presentation will describe the status of the program, core tenets, and examples of server, storage, networking equipment, power equipment, cooling equipment, and management and application software capabilities.

The Green Grid and DOE Save Energy Now have been engaged on a Data Center Program that will include case studies, a training curriculum, and the development of DC Pro software tools. The DC Pro software tools will define baseline energy use and identify key energy saving opportunities. The session will discuss what is currently available and future assessment tools.

During this session four Contributor Member companies will present on the latest developments on The Green Grid Efficiency metrics. The first section will provide a brief background of PUE and DCiE. The second section will provide an overview of the DCiE Detailed Analysis white paper. The final section will provide an overview of the recently published PUE / DCiE Usage and Public Reporting Guidelines and will include a quick preview of three Green Grid web-based tools scheduled for future release: PUE Calculator, Free Cooling Map, and Power Configurations Calculator.

Keynote - Rob Bernard from Microsoft

While the DCeP metric is well defined, it can sometimes be difficult to implement. The Green Grid (TGG) recognizes that there is a need for something that is simpler to implement than the DCeP metric, and that can be used to make comparisons of the work done within a data center. TGG is proposing that a simple indicator, or proxy, while less accurate than a metric such as DCeP, can be useful because it will be easier to implement. The goal is to find a proxy that will substitute for a difficult measurement, but that still gives a good enough indication of useful work completed. Eight potential proxies are proposed in this session, with instructions on how to give feedback to TGG and what future work may be undertaken.

This session will review The Green Grid Association's PUE Scalability Metric and Statistical Analyses white paper and illustrate the use of metrics and statistics. The PUE metric allows for the leveraging of periodic power data measurements taken in the data center and the analysis from this paper will help the data center facilities manager better understand and measure the value of opportunities for investments in energy efficiency improvements. Also covered is viewing the metrics and analyses on either real-time or cumulative gauges.

The presentation will discuss an analysis on efficiency of power distribution configurations done by the Power Task Force in the Technology and Strategy Work Group. Based on the previously released Qualitative Analysis of Power Distribution Configurations For Data Centers white paper, this paper and presentation turn to look quantitatively at efficiency for simplified power distributions and their components. The model used for the analysis will be discussed, as well as the assumptions that were made. The highest efficiency component data available allows for a solid comparison of 7 configurations' end to end efficiency curves against a legacy data center with typical components from about 10 years ago.

State of The Green Grid

This session will provide an overview of the Liaison Committee and discuss the three major areas of TGG focus: IT, Facilities, and Government. Representatives from organizations in the IT and Facilities sectors will present a synopsis of their relationship with The Green Grid and key deliverables that are in development. The presentation will conclude with a Q&A session that will include representatives from IT, Facilities, and Government organizations The Green Grid has been working with.

Representatives from the DOE, EPA, and EU CoC will be present to provide updates on projects they have been engaged in with The Green Grid. These projects include: ENERGY STAR for Data Centers, TGG/EPA Data Center Assessment, DC Pro Assessment Tool and Process, and the EU CoC for Data Centers.

Virtualization has long held the promise of energy savings due to its server consolidation capabilities. This presentation will provide those responsible for reducing energy consumption with a description of the advantages and processes that should be considered when virtualizing servers in the data center.

The US EPA will establish an ENERGY STAR for Server Program and specifications for release in Q1’09. This presentation will cover the topical status, TGG position, and future plans implied in the TGG feedback provided to the US EPA.

Data center efficiency is impacted by physical infrastructure equipment residing both inside and outside of the physical data center. This presentation provides a comprehensive, illustrative series of maps, points out where the power and cooling efficiency losses are likely to occur, and offers suggestions regarding how to correct the inefficiencies.

The Operations Work Group of The Green Grid is developing a set of information models for power and cooling equipment in the data center. These models will enable key metrics and management functions for this equipment to be integrated with IT management systems. Specifically this modeling activity is defining extensions to the Common Information Model (CIM) managed by the Distributed Management Task Force and establishing profiles for power and cooling equipment.

The Green Grid is currently developing three tools in an effort to aid data center operators.

This session will examine the relationship of relative humidity (RH) and dew point to electrostatic charge generation and electrostatic discharge (ESD). Recent work has shown that relying on RH for static control has little if any merit in an ESD control program. In addition, system level testing of ESD immunity for CE compliance assures a reasonably high level of equipment robustness. The issues, current technical understanding, and opportunities for reduced humidity levels to increase the window for economizers and reduced energy in data centers will also be discussed.

Meet the newly formed Advisory Council! The Advisory Council serves as the unified voice of the end user community, working directly with The Green Grid’s Board of Directors by providing input and guidance on the general direction of the consortium’s strategies. This session will provide an overview of the Advisory Council and its composition of key end user companies

Members Meeting - State of The Green Grid

The proper sizing of the power and cooling infrastructure is one of the most important design choices for a data center owner. Incorrectly sizing the power or cooling load, in the best case, causes inefficiencies and wasted energy; while in the worst case can create capacity problems and operational issues. This session will review how IT equipment information has been used to size this infrastructure.

This session will discuss the EMEA scene for data centers and will include the 2008 position and 2009 outlook for the EMEA Communications and Data Collection & Analysis Work Groups.

This session will provide an update on Japan Communications Work Group and Japan Data Collection and Analysis Work Group 2008 accomplishments, 2009 activity plans and a look at the Japan Data Center Market Baseline trial survey.

In this session PNNL’s experience applying TGG’s proposed Data Center Energy Productivity (DCeP) metric to a HPC cluster with scientific workloads will be discussed.

In this session, the current status of utility engagement with data centers and the IT industry, focusing on energy efficiency programs and services, citing support, and demand response. Pacific Gas and Electric Company engagements will be highlighted, but also those of members of the PG&E-sponsored Utility IT EE Coalition, numbering over thirty-five utilities in North America. In a look to the future, new energy efficiency technologies, incentive programs, and service models; demand response technologies; data center self-generation and load shifting potential; and the role of IT in enabling utility "smart grid" programs will be discussed.

ASHRAEs Building Ratings and Codes

Baseline Efficiency Measurement Market Study

Five Ways to Save Server Power

Global Perspective in Energy Efficiency

Industry's Collaboration with Government on Energy Efficiency

Leveraging IT and Facilities Organizational Behavior

Measuring Data Center Productivity

Measuring DCiE Today

Peer Review of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Study on Direct Current in the Data Center

Rating Systems for Data Centers Panel

Seven Ways to Improve Cooling

The Green Grid Annual Members Meeting / Member Feedback

The Green Grid's Initial Technology Roadmap

Utility Incentive-Rebate Initiatives Panel

Working Lunch - The Green Grid Data Center Metrics