Like Sunday's Super Bowl, just about everyone in our industry would agree that Green IT is a high-stakes game. But imagine if they played the Super Bowl without any rules on how to keep score. How could the coaches make rational decisions on how to play the game? How would either side know if they were winning?

Yet that's pretty much the situation we face with Green IT, because there is no industry-wide standard for measuring energy efficiency in data centers. Without any agreed-upon way to keep score, it's often difficult for IT and data center managers to prioritize their efficiency efforts.

As industry leaders gather for the 2nd Annual Green Grid Technical Forum this week, the need for an industry-wide metric is one of the most important topics, with participants learning about and discussing a variety of options.

Developing such a metric has proven challenging because of the different types of work data centers perform. For example, some focus primarily on processing-intensive tasks typical of scientific and financial applications, while others are more devoted to data transfer-intensive work to support Web-based applications.

From our perspective at Emerson Network Power, a metric needs to accomplish two fundamental goals: It should encourage the right behavior, and it should help buyers make the right choices, which means it should be published right at the IT device level and be readily scalable to the data center level.

To show how this approach can help uncover the true story of IT energy efficiency, we recently published a white paper [PDF] that offers a sample, or placeholder metric -- CUPS (Compute Units Per Second). The CUPS analysis yielded clear strategies for calculating and prioritizing IT efficiency actions.

The discussion at Green Grid, and beyond, is critical to the industry-wide effort to address the efficiency challenge. We need agreement on a metric -- very soon -- so we can move forward aggressively as an industry to meet the efficiency challenge.

It's important that we make a good decision on how to keep score, as what we decide will determine not so much who wins or loses -- but whether our efforts make a real difference in saving money and being environmentally responsible.

Jack Pouchet is the Director of Energy Initiatives at Emerson Network Power, a leading network solutions company based in St. Louis, Mo.