IBM, HP, Sun and AMD are backing The Green Grid to improve energy efficiency

A new group has been formed to curb power consumption in datacentres. The Green Grid will develop best-practice methodologies and is sponsored by IBM, HP, Sun and AMD - but so far neither Intel nor Dell are involved.

Concerns about power consumption have risen in line with soaring electricity costs and the energy needs of ultra-dense equipment such as blade servers over the last few years. That has led firms such as Sun to suggest that performance-per-watt is a more valid metric for assessing servers than benchmarks that focus purely on performance.

Experts are divided on the best ways to tackle the problems. Cooling experts such as APC have developed a range of liquid, air, gas and other gadgets but others have suggested that new datacentre and server designs are more cost-effective.

AMD and Sun have used power efficiency as a stick to beat their respective rivals Intel and Dell. Sun’s marketing even goes so far as to note that Dell “rhymes with hell” and mocks the heat dissipation of the PC giant’s servers.

Intel promises greater power efficiency in its most recent Xeon processors and yet further gains with its next-generation architecture.