Green Grid pollutes environment with more white papers

Comment The Green Grid has been flopping around for about two years and continues to flop.

The organization, backed by some of the biggest name vendors in the technology game, held a conference this week in San Francisco to release - you know what's coming - more white papers. How many white papers? Oh, who cares.

The Green Grid appears locked down by more bureaucracy than your usual standards body type organization. It took one year for the backers to fill out the paperwork necessary to turn into a real organization. And that shift to flip a wooden Pinocchio into a boy only occurred after Microsoft and Intel agreed to play with AMD, Sun, Dell, HP, IBM and others.

Another year has passed, and we find little of substance taking place.

For example, Green Grid representatives held a conference call last week to tell the press about all the organization has accomplished ahead of the Green Grid Forum event. That would be helpful if the representatives actually spewed out details. Instead, they just ordered reporters to show up at their event to hear more information about these precious white papers.

Worse still, only the first day of the event was open to the press. Lucky reporters were treated to presentations on the Green Grid's organizational structure, an overview of - yes - the white papers, and a summary of data center metrics.

The juicy stuff taking place at the event appears to have occurred today.

Instead of flowchart hokum, there was a presentation by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on its Direct Current in the data center study and a session on seven ways to improve data center cooling. Useful, practical information, right?

Nah. We were told today's session is off-limits because it covers "work in progress". God forbid you discuss work before a white paper is done.

One might think the organizers would see fit to let reporters bring word of the Green Grid's actual toil to the masses. You know, it looks good for companies such as Dell and HP to be seen on the cutting edge of greening the data center, and it's not like the Green Grid is exactly drowning in attention. (We're seeing all of three stories on the conference all based on the puffy pre-event call where Green Grid officials filtered media questions to pick the ones of their liking.)

Er, but no. They'd rather see summaries of their structure in watered down stories.

And forget the press - we know you were thinking the same thing. What about other companies out there that could use this help? Well, you've got to cough up a membership fee to get your mitts on those wonderful white papers, although the Green Grid is considering making abridged copies of the papers available to Joe Schlub. How nice.

Surely there must be some former Soviet official out there who can show the Green Grid how to take this to the next level of lethargy. ®