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.