As millions upon billions of hard drives and processors work for days and weeks on end, they suck up vast amounts of energy from power grids around the world.  Now, an influential tech industry organization is creating a Green Grid to try help increase energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems.

This week the Green Grid added another member in ONStor, Inc., a company that specializes in clustered NAS (network attached) storage systems. ONStor claims that its NAS technology offers up to 95 percent power savings compared to traditional direct-attached and competing networked storage environments.

The Green Grid consortium is working to develop standards, measurement tools, and new technologies that will help its members and other data-driven companies green up their computing centers. While some of the techniques and tools that the Green Grid consortium is developing are state-of-the-art systems, others are simple concepts like consolidating file servers to reduce power and cooling consumption.

In an independent survey last summer conducted by ONStor, 369 IT managers were asked about their green projects, with mixed results. While 60 percent said they had a green initiative in place, or were working on it, the other 40 percent had not discussed a green initiative within their company at all. Nearly 40 percent said they would go green if doing so resulted in 20-50 percent cost savings, and 11 percent report interest in creating a chief energy officer position in their organization.

In 2007, the Green Grid and the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy announced they will work together to educate IT managers on the technical and financial aspects of greener data centers, and promote increased energy efficiency in U.S. data center facilities.

Green Grid was founded by HP, Cisco, IBM and Microsoft, and has added more than 100 members since its launch in February, 2007.