SNIA, the Storage Networking Industry Association, has set up a task force and technical working group to address "green storage". The groups will develop resources to help IT managers understand and address environmental issues, the organisation said.

Jürgen Arnold, SNIA Europe's chairman, said while there's plenty of information on green IT available on the web, and the topic does now have board-level credibility within companies, IT managers still find devising a successful green strategy more of a challenge than it ought to be.

The problem, he added, is that while the vendors have done a great job of eliminating hazardous substances to meet RoHS, cutting their equipment's energy use, and talking up the green agenda, it is difficult to get the sort of independent information needed to work out data centre efficiencies, calculate your carbon footprint, and do energy modelling.

He recommended The Green Grid as a good source of info on the topic, but said that more vendor-independent advice was needed - not least because there's a whole stack of other technologies that could have a place at the green table, including data de-duplication, thin provisioning, and tape-based archiving.

"SNIA recently formed the SNIA Green Storage Task Force and a Green Storage Technical Working Group to provide organisations with vendor-independent information," he said. "As a result, the association has already started delivering a tutorial to help IT professionals better understand this topic."

Of course, storage is not the only area that needs to cut its carbon footprint, but who knows - if SNIA's work means that "green" claims in general get independently assessed, it might turn hot air into a cool breeze. ®

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