In August of last year, I attended an IBM/AMD press event here in NYC. The companies were showing off bladed servers featuring power-sipping Opterons and novel new ways of cooling during what turned out to be one of the hottest days of the year.

They couldn't have planned it better, but as news goes, it barely made a blip. An Inconvenient Truth later, however, and the industry is warming (pun intended) to the idea of energy savings in the data center.

bITa Planet's Jennifer Zaino reports on last week's meeting of the Green Grid. Among the topics discussed were hugely wasteful server infrastructures and how they're contributing to an impending power crunch.

Gartner has said that half of the world’s datacenters will lack enough energy capacity to meet the power and cooling requirements of the latest high-density computing equipment by the end of 2008, according to a report issued by The Green Grid.

Problems also accrue due to the fact that almost all the electrical power that feeds the data center ends up as heat, which requires datacenters to expend energy on cooling equipment; and that there’s tremendous waste in the power conversion cycles that occur from the moment power enters a data center until it reaches a server microprocessor.

The organization also managed to lure several new and influential members in the hopes that greener data center will soon become the norm.