The Green Grid (TGG) and the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) have announced a strategic alliance at Cloud Computing Expo 2011 West. Together, TGG and the ODCA will utilize TGG’s IT efficiency metrics, including Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE), to align with ODCA’s cloud usage model requirements to deliver resource efficient computing for industry solutions. Initial delivery of joint work is expected in the first half of 2012.

 

The initial focus of the collaboration will be to define a standard unit for measuring carbon footprint for both existing and new ODCA usage models and TGG metrics. Through the collaboration, TGG and the ODCA aim to accelerate the development of standards related to energy efficiency in the data center.

The group effort brings together the leading customer voice on cloud computing and the global authority on resource efficient data centers and business computing ecosystems. The Open Data Center Alliance, a group of 300+ companies that represent over $100B in annual IT spend, recently published the first customer-driven requirements for the cloud with release of its initial usage models. Launched in 2007, The Green Grid is a global consortium focused on driving resource efficiency in business computing by developing meaningful and user-centric metrics to help IT and facilities better manage their resources.

“The Green Grid’s mission is to improve resource efficiency in business computing, which includes the impact of carbon usage as a result of cloud computing,” said Tim Mohin, AMD representative and Board member of The Green Grid. “The Green Grid’s efforts with the ODCA will bring much-needed efficiency metrics and resources to businesses that leverage the cloud. We’re excited to see the results of this collaboration put into action and the energy savings they will generate.”

“Our strategic collaboration with The Green Grid will help us gain valuable insight into standard measurement of workload carbon emissions, enabling us to report and reduce the environmental impact of data center operations,” said Mario Mueller, vice president of IT Infrastructure at BMW. “Together, the ODCA and The Green Grid will drive initiatives that not only manage power efficiencies, but result in a reduced total cost of ownership. With member adoption of cloud operations forecasted to triple in the next two years, the collaboration comes at a critical point of adoption.”

The two organizations expect the collaboration will yield new content and resources from each organization as well as the enhancement of existing content. To learn more about the collaboration and the organizations visit www.opendatacenteralliance.org or www.thegreengrid.org/.