In this keynote panel discussion from Uptime Institute Symposium 2011, leaders from various data center efficiency groups discuss how these organizations could cooperate to improve data center efficiency.

Uptime Institute Executive Director Pitt Turner says we need to do more to drive development and adoption of energy efficiency metrics for IT devices. “We need to have something that’s simple, easy to apply, commonly understood metric for the IT side,” Turner said. “We need to boil it down to a couple of key metrics and start focusing on what is to the left of the decimal point on PUE.”

John Haas from The Green Grid says the data center industry has a target on its back. It’s a big energy user and we hear about it all the time in the public. But data center industry has not been very good at advocating its own successes, like driving GDP and digitizing resource intensive business practices.

Give us your take. What are the initiatives you’d like to see driven by the data center industry groups?

Last week, Uptime Institute staff Vince Renaud and I attended The Green Grid Technical Forum where we met Harkeeret Singh, Global Head of Energy for Technology Operations in Thomson Reuters and Green Grid Advisory board member. Harqs is the lead author on The Green Grid’s Data Center Maturity Model (which is available for public consumption now).

In the video, Harqs and I chat about the new DCMM tool, and the challenges for implementing it.

Uptime Institute staffers Vince Renaud and I are at the Green Grid Technical Forum, and you can follow us and all of The Green Grid discussions on Twitter at hash-tag #TGG11. We’ll be posting news, links and quotes from the event at the Santa Clara, Calif. event March 1-2.

Mark Monroe, newly appointed executive director of The Green Grid, has had his hands full, nailing down speakers and technical content for TGG’s annual event in Santa Clara March 1-2.

“The Technical Forum is a great catalyst for the completion of work,” Monroe said. “All of our volunteers have day jobs, and like any volunteer army, they do what they can. It’s a tremendously productive time.”

The big news coming out of this year’s event will be the unveiling of the data center maturity model — a self-assessment tool for organizations that want to benchmark where they fall on The Green Grid’s scale of data center efficiency.

Monroe said other news to come out of the event will include broadening the scope of the organization’s mission to include more than just energy efficiency (see the recent Water Usage Effectiveness metric as an example).

Also, Monroe said an international team from including representatives from the U.S. Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency and The Green Grid have been working with data center industry representatives from Japan, and the European Union to agree on a standard way to measure and report on Power Usage Effectiveness.

“We’ll have the specifications laid out, so we’re all measuring it the same way,” Monroe said. “You’ll be closer to being able to compare a PUE reported in Japan with a PUE in Europe, compared to a Green Grid member in the U.S. “