APPLICATIONS

Non-Profit Consortium of IT Companies Formed to Address Power and Cooling Issues in the Data Center; APC to Provide Leadership & Technical Expertise on Data Center Efficiency APC today announced that the company is a founding member of The Green Grid, a newly formed global consortium of information technology (IT) specialists dedicated to developing and promoting energy efficiency for data centers and information service delivery. APC’s participation in The Green Grid further enforces the company’s commitment to the management of energy and power usage in the data center. APC will provide significant technical expertise garnered from APC’s extensive history as a leader in critical data center infrastructure. According to a recent study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the rapid increase in server usage in the U.S. and worldwide has led to a significant spike in data center energy consumption. The study showed that in the U.S., the power consumption for servers and data center-related equipment was equivalent to about five 1,000-megawatt power plants, while worldwide, the electricity consumption for the servers was equivalent to 14 power plants. The total electric bill to operate those servers and related infrastructure equipment was $2.7 billion in the United States and $7.2 billion worldwide. To curb this ever-increasing consumption of energy, new strategies for software, infrastructure and education need to be formulated. Thus, the companies forming The Green Grid are all collectively committed to driving new user-centric metrics, technology standards, and best practices for use by data center managers worldwide. “Advancements in the use of new technologies focused on delivering greater useful computing output to meet varied consumer and industry demands are placing more energy demands on the data center than ever before,” said Neil Rasmussen, senior vice president and chief technical officer, APC. “APC has been a longstanding proponent of a more energy efficient environment in the data center, offering its InfraStruXure® architecture as one potential solution to address power and cooling issues. By lending our expertise and leadership to The Green Grid since the very beginning, we hope to continue to advance the discussion of achieving greater energy efficiency, while meeting the dramatic increases in computing demand in consideration of the rising power costs and energy consumption that are placing a major strain on organizations and the environment.” APC joins several organizations within The Green Grid representing critical segments of the data center eco-system. APC serves on The Green Grid board of directors, along with other companies including AMD, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Rackable Systems, SprayCool, Sun Microsystems, and VMware. The official charter of The Green Grid calls upon IT industry leaders to increase power efficiency in data centers across the globe. The group aims to develop meaningful, platform-neutral standards, measurement methods, processes and new technologies to improve energy efficient performance of global data centers and plans on working with leaders of the IT community to ensure these specifications and metrics fit their requirements.