IBM and other vendors have formed an alliance program to support standards to boost energy efficiency and resilience at new enterprise data centers.
The new alliance with top IT companies around the world would enable customers to evolve to 'more energy efficient, virtualized, and resilient' enterprise data centers while maximizing the use of open technologies, IBM said.
The initial members of the alliance are Brocade, Citrix, Eaton, Emulex, Juniper Networks, Novell, RedHat, Sun and VMware. The group will invite other independent suppliers of data center equipment to join.
IBM said the program would seek to standardize technologies that improved data center efficiency by - for example - 'setting caps on energy use, shifting resources to meet business requirements, or adjusting workloads to avoid higher billing rates.'
Separately, IBM announced a program to support best practices and skills for data center operation and management.