The bandwagon that is energy efficiency has gained 28 more riders, with Brocade, Novell and Copan among those signing up to the Green Grid, a non-profit consortium set up to address the problems of energy consumption in the data centre.

Copan claims that because its massive array of idle disk (MAID) technology powers down unused disks, it can run 91TB of storage per kilowatt of power, versus 4TB per KW for Fibre Channel disk and 17TB per KW for SATA disk. Copan also claims to be the first storage company to join, even though you might have read somewhere that GG founders IBM, Sun and HP may also have some sort of minor interest in storage.

Novell meanwhile reckons its ZENworks management tools and virtualised SUSE Linux on Xen have a big role to play in saving server power, and Brocade says it needs to be in there because networked storage has become a major power consumer in the data centre.

The other new GG riders signing up this week are 1E, 365 Main, Active Power, Affiniti, Aperture, Azul Systems, BT, Chatsworth Products, Cherokee International, ColdWatt , Digital Realty Trust, Eaton, Force10 Networks, Juniper Networks, Netezza, Pillar Data, Panduit, Rackspace Managed Hosting, SGI, SatCon Stationary Power Systems, Texas Instruments, The 451 Group and Vossel Solution. No, we hadn't heard of half of those companies either.[And what an analyst firm - the 451 Group - doing in there? - Ed]

Green Grid is holding its first technical summit in Denver next week, and says it expects the event to produce detailed technical objectives and programme plans for data centre design, operation and efficiency.

We're sure the group will accomplish something one day. ®