IBM has created and expanded its initiatives to improve energy efficiency at data centers along with forming an alliance focused on data center standards.

The company's new software is designed to measure power consumption throughout all parts of a data center, allowing managers to monitor and make adjustments to reduce demand. The Active Energy Manager software was announced at the company's Business Partner Leadership Conference in Los Angeles. The software tracks energy used by all parts of a data center, breaking down usage among servers, storage, networking, air conditioning and power.

In addition, IBM revealed it is expanding its Energy Efficiency Certificate program to encourage energy savings at data centers around the world. The company started the program last year, letting clients earn certificates for cutting energy use. Starting in seven countries, the program will expand to 27 more countries.

IBM is also creating an alliance of hardware and software vendors to support standards for new enterprise data centers. The program is focusing on interoperability and open standards for data centers as well as bringing together independent vendors to allow customers to have a wide variety of choices when improving their data centers.

Some of the main issues the program will address are virtualization and green computing concerns such as energy efficiency for power and cooling. So far, the program has received support from IT vendors Brocade, Citrix, Eaton, Emulex, Juniper Networks, Novell, RedHat, Sun and VMware.