Tech vendors line up for Green Grid

The Green Grid is gathering momentum with more technology suppliers lining up to join the energy-saving consortium.

Brocade, Novell and Copan have joined the grid this week, joining other global vendors including IBM, Intel, AMD, Sun, Dell and HP.

The Green Grid is a consortium of companies seeking to reduce power consumption of corporate data centres. The three new members take the total membership to 38 since its launch in February.

Tom Buiocchi, vice president for marketing at Brocade, the market leader in networked storage solutions, said that joining the grid was "an imperative". "Coupling the strong energy advances we've built into Brocade's products with the common efforts of our peers is an important step in advancing the larger industry effort around energy efficiency in the data centre," he said.

Novell has similar motives in its decision to join the consortium. The company claims it wants to help customers "reduce the power consumption in their data centre through the operating system virtualisation built into Suse Linux". Virtualisation, the company said, was "a key area of focus around data centre efficiency". But the Green Grid has not been without its controversies. Intel was originally excluded from the consortium, while rival AMD was a founding member. Intel eventually joined in February.

Less well known is Copan Systems, the third company to join the Green Grid this week, which builds systems that offer persistent data storage. The company's products aim to greatly improve data centre efficiency by using intelligent mass storage based on Maid (Massive Array of Idle Disks) storage. These work by utilising the spare disk storage capacity of systems.

The Green Grid is to hold its first technical summit later this month in Denver. The summit aims to establish detailed plans and objectives for the consortium.