The Green Grid and Open Data Center Alliance join forces

In an unexpected outpouring of cooperation the ODCA announced at this week’s Cloud Computing Expo 2011 that they would be collaborating with the Green Grid to make use of TGG’s existing metrics and efficiency standards to build the ODCA’s forthcoming customer-focused cloud usage model. Rather than starting from scratch or trying to promulgate their own set of standards the ODCA made the right choice to build on the work already done by TGG and collaborate with them in the development of their own already announced roadmap.

The Green Grid already has an impressive body of work with multiple generations of standards that have been refined and made progressively more useful. Their recent announcements of metrics that branch out from basic power utilization into other areas, such as computing efficiencies and water usage effectiveness show the directions that TGG is going in order to provide a complete set of metrics that allow datacenter operators and designers to build and run more efficient facilities.

With the ODCA and their goal of giving purchasers of datacenter equipment and services more of a voice that can be heard by the providers of equipment and services, hooking up with TGG, which is an alliance made up primarily of those who provide datacenter equipment, services, and facilities you would seem to have a meeting of the perfect group to build functional metrics that can be directly applied to datacenters, both new and existing. The groups have announced that their first collaborative metrics will be focused on measuring the carbon footprint of datacenters and datacenter designs.