AMD, HP, IBM and Sun joined a common project called The Green Grid.

In an attempt to reduce power consumption for PC customers and data center managers AMD, HP, IBM and Sun joined a common project in order to deliver the best solutions to customers.

This is definitely not a stand alone project as The Green Grind has some major league players involved being also supported by The Environmental Protection Agency and The Alliance to Save Energy. Also, the project aims to gain even more companies involved as it plans to grow over the summer.

The decision was made after a large number of IT professionals complained about the growing power and cooling demands which they can no longer keep up with. Millions of dollars are invested into building new data centers just because what already exists is no longer enough.

According to the companies involved in this project the problem goes beyond the processors. It is also about the servers, networking, the air conditioning, heating and ventilation, power supply and even software. Following the pattern of the open-source community, the project hopes to create a similar online network in which the communication between the members could help out solving different problems with best solutions possible.

Sun has actually announced having started working on creating a metric system in order to measure performance and power consumption. This could turn out to be a heavy decision. Should they measure performance, wattage or bandwidth? No matter what their decision is going to be, this is the first baby step in what seems to be a long long way.