AMD Forms 'Green Grid' With Sun, HP and IBM

By Jessica Davis -- Electronic News, 4/19/2006

Looking to help reduce power and cooling demands in enterprise data centers, AMD has announced plans to launch a new organization, the Green Grid Consortium.

The chipmaker said that Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and IBM are joining it as founding members of the organization, and expects the Green Grid will gain additional founding members in the OEM and user community before the official launch in a few weeks.

“We are looking to add OEMs,  software folks, system integrators and user companies to the consortium,” said Kevin Knox, VP of the commercial business at AMD.  “We want to raise awareness of the issue.”

The founding members expect to launch the organization in the early part of May. One of the potential goals of the group is to create a standard way of looking at power and heat in the data center.

Knox pointed out that appliances have Energy Star designations, but devices such as routers don’t have any kind of label that shows how energy efficient they may be.

“We are forming to try and address that,” he said. “We need a standard way to view this.”

Knox said AMD has invited its processor rival Intel to join the organization too.

AMD said the goals of the Green Grid Consortium are supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Alliance to Save Energy. According to the organization’s official statement, members of the Green Grid seek to decrease the datacenter and other IT facility energy usage patterns by defining and propagating best practices in datacenter operation, as well as construction and design. The organization is intended to serve as an interactive resource for IT professionals.

The non-profit association is open to any and all IT industry professionals with an interest in addressing global energy consumption issues, particularly datacenter managers and IT operations executives.