Thursday, March 22, 2012

Green Grid Forum: new standards, tools, and documentation to improve the datacenter

At their annual Forum and member Meeting event, the Green Grid announced the availability of additional tools, standard documentation, and educational course targeted at building more efficient and effective datacenters. The Green Grid Academy also provides coursework to develop a standard level of knowledge among operational employees of datacenter providers.

The announcements include the release of white papers, policy analysis, survey results, the Data Center Maturity Model Tool, and presentations from their conference. Unlike many organizations this type, much of the information presented at their conference is now available online and can be downloaded by non-members. This is despite the fact that they have recently introduced a lower price individual membership which gets the user access to everything and access to their annual conference.

Two of the most interesting forum presentations available online are the Data Center Design Guide and the Data Center Life Cycle Analysis. The Design Guide is described as "a guide for the standardization and evolution of key capabilities" and is based on five core tenants:

  • Fully Scalable:

All systems/subsystems scale energy consumption and performance to use the minimal energy required to accomplish workload.

  • Fully Instrumented:

All systems/subsystems within the datacenter are instrumented and provide real time operating power and performance data through standardized management interfaces.

  • Fully Announced:

All systems/subsystems are discoverable and report minimum and maximum energy used, performance level capabilities, and location.

  • Enhanced Management Infrastructure:

Compute, network, storage, power, cooling, and facilities utilize standardized management/interoperability interfaces and language.

  • Policy Driven:

Operations are automated at all levels via policies set through management infrastructure.

  • Standardized Metrics/Measurements:

Energy efficiency is monitored at all levels within the datacenter from individual subsystems to complete datacenter and is reported using standardized metrics during operation.

Using these five core principles for datacenter design seems to cover the majority of the issues encountered when creating good datacenter operations.

The Life Cycle Analysis Study presentation offers a fairly comprehensive outline of a datacenter lifecycle analysis and provides a good reference point for organizations looking to perfrom this same type of study.

Lots of well presented, useful information continues to become available of the Green Grid website, on a regular basis

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