The Green Grid opened its Technical Forum with new programs, tools and metrics and reporting guidelines designed to help data center managers worldwide improve the efficiency of their facilities and operations.

The forum is seeking public comment on its "Proxies for Estimating Data Center Productivity," which will be discussed at the Technical Forum.

The event featured a keynote by Rob Bernard, Chief Sustainability Strategist at Microsoft.

"As IT and Facilities budgets receive increased scrutiny, efficiency becomes a more business critical issue for data center managers globally," said Tom Brey, a director of The Green Grid and senior technical staff member in IBM's systems and technology group. "Members of The Green Grid have been working hard to develop new tools, metrics and guidelines for measuring efficiency, and we're looking forward to receiving industry feedback at this year's Technical Forum."

Following on the introduction last year of PUE and DCiE metrics which help end-users separate and measure their facility power consumption from their IT power consumption, The Green Grid members and industry attendees at the Forum will explore different methods for measuring and reporting energy efficiency and data center productivity (DCP).

At the Technical Forum, leaders of the organization will announce plans for the new Data Center 2.0 program. This initiative will provide the industry with a multi-year set of design guides proposed for use by data center operators and designers to build and operate energy efficient data centers. In addition The Data Center 2.0 program will also include a recognition program for end-users reporting their PUE or DCiE measurements within the stated guidelines.

"The data center is comprised of highly complex systems, and while multiple technical designs and best practice documents exist within the industry, there is not a single authoritative source taking a holistic approach to data center designs and moving the data center as a whole forward," said Jim Pappas, a director of The Green Grid and director of initiative marketing in Intel's Server Platforms Group.

A new Green Grid web site includes an informational micro-site co-developed with the U.S. Department of Energy's Save Energy Now program to help data center managers initiate and implement an energy management program.

The site also includes the latest white papers from the forum including one called PUE Scalability which explains how to use data collected from energy consumption to produce both statistical analyses, and introduces a new metric called PUE Scalability to better assess how well a facility's total power consumption scales with changes in IT power consumption.