Cloud Computing: Cloud-Standard Alliances Unite
December 22, 2011
The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) and The Green Grid (TGG) alliance have announced that they’re joining forces in their efforts to create standards for the cloud.
The Green Grid is a non-profit, open industry consortium of end-users, policy-makers, technology providers, facility architects, and utility companies collaborating to improve the resource efficiency of data centers and business computing ecosystems. The Green Grid is trying to create a set of metrics for power, cooling, and space as related to the efficient operation of data centers. Their metrics have helped many operators in designing, building and running more efficient facilities. It makes sense that the ODCA would team with the TGG. The TGG has been working on the problem of data center efficiencies for some time and has generated several generations of standards in this area.
In particular, the two groups will collaborate on Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) metric developed by The Green Grid’s which addresses data center-specific carbon emissions. The joint collaboration is expected to complete sometime in the first part of 2012…
Mario Mueller, vice president of IT Infrastructure at BMW, said that “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 move is important because of the power in numbers behind the ODCA. Collectively, the members of the group account for more than 90 percent of the virtualization software market, and it includes more than two-thirds of vendors that supply server hardware and software, storage and enterprise management software. Growth of cloud spending on cloud computing among these group members is expected to be five times faster than the cloud spending occurring in the general cloud computing market.