AMD Rallies Industry Leaders to Reduce Datacenter Power and Cooling Levels to the Mutual Benefit of Business, Environment

Business Wire, April 19, 2006

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- AMD (NYSE: AMD):

AMD, HP, Sun Microsystems and IBM Announce The Green Grid to Serve IT Professionals Seeking to Lower Power Consumption in Datacenters

A group of technology industry leaders today announced their intent to form The Green Grid to help reduce growing power and cooling demands in enterprise datacenters. AMD (NYSE: AMD), HP, Sun Microsystems and IBM represent the founding sponsors of The Green Grid, an open, global organization whose goals are supported by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Alliance to Save Energy. Members of The Green Grid seek to decrease the datacenter and other IT facility energy usage patterns by defining and propagating best practices in datacenter operation, as well as construction and design. The Green Grid is intended to serve as an interactive resource for IT professionals; a forum for sharing proven practices in datacenter energy management as well as working with other organizations to identify new industry-standards and metrics related to energy.

As an independent, non-profit association, The Green Grid is open to any and all IT industry professionals with an interest in addressing global energy consumption issues, particularly datacenter managers and IT operations executives. Founding membership is also open to companies such as ISVs, IHVs, systems integrators and VARs, analyst firms, utility companies and anyone else concerned about energy efficiency issues in the enterprise.

Members are welcome to participate by registering online at www.TheGreenGrid.org, an independently hosted site where they will share best practices, discuss challenges, and define solutions to the increasing energy demands from IT. The role of the sponsors will be to help enable and fund the member-driven organization. More information will be available in the coming weeks with details on The Green Grid founding members as well as the organization's charter.

The Green Grid Founding Sponsors

The founding sponsors of The Green Grid represent a core group of innovative datacenter solution providers who have been focused on the issue of power consumption for several years. The Green Grid represents a unique opportunity for the sponsor companies to be a part of a collaborative environment where they can work with IT professionals to gain insights on power consumption that go beyond their respective products.

"Datacenter power consumption is a growing global concern on both a business and environmental level. The Green Grid was founded in order to bring the brightest minds in the industry together to help define innovative energy solutions that will improve performance-per-watt across the industry, today and tomorrow," said Marty Seyer, senior vice president, commercial and performance computing, AMD. "The Green Grid represents not only a call to action for other IT leaders but also a natural next step for a technology industry that is coming of age with respect to solving the world's more pressing problems and challenges. Based on the level of early interest, endorsements and participation levels, it is clear this organization is coming along at the right time to help solve energy issues in the datacenter and across all IT environments."

"Sun has long understood the need for broad industry coordination on energy efficient technology and sees The Green Grid as a complimentary effort to its work aligning the industry around a standard metric for energy consumption," said Ed Hunter, director, Eco Responsibility Initiative, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "As the demands on IT increase, it is the industry's responsibility to help customers make smarter choices around all issues in the datacenter, including energy consumption."

"For more than 10 years, HP has been addressing the power and cooling needs of customers," said Paul Perez, vice president, Storage, Networking and Infrastructure, Industry Standard Servers, HP. "Today, HP has extensive research, modeling tools, products and services that allow customers to provision and cool their datacenters. HP is pleased to work with industry leaders through The Green Grid to create energy efficiency improvements at the component and system level."

"IBM is pleased to announce our intent to become a founding sponsor of The Green Grid," said Doug Balog, vice president and business line executive, IBM BladeCenter. "IBM has been a leader in innovation around power and cooling technologies and committed to implementing energy efficiency programs for more than 30 years. We look forward to working together with other like-minded companies to promote further innovation around power management in the datacenter."

Environmental Support

The Green Grid is devoted to working closely with both the EPA and the Alliance. Both organizations are in full support of The Green Grid and will play a key role in the development of the organization's charter as well as collaborating to identify innovative solutions that cut energy costs as well as benefit the environment.