The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has this week become the latest IT organisation to launch a green initiative designed to help enhance the energy efficiency of the sector's products.

Announced at the Storage Networking World event in Dallas earlier this week, the project will aim to improve energy efficiency in networked storage technologies.

With the quantity of electronic data companies store estimated to double each year, storage technologies represent a key challenge for IT vendors keen to limit the environmental impact of their products and reduce the energy requirements of firms' datacentres.

Vincent Franceschini, chair of the board of directors at the SNIA, said the new group would look to co-operate with government's concerned about burgeoning datacentre energy use and develop and promote best practices for measuring and reducing the energy used by storage products.

The group added that it would also develop tutorials and whitepapers for storage vendors and IT managers, and help member companies investigate more energy efficient technologies such as "data de-duplication, thin provisioning and tape-based archiving".

Nineteen leading storage vendors – including EMC, Dell, Sun, HP, IBM, NetApp and Hitachi Data Systems – have joined the initiative as founder members. The group also called on other storage vendors to sign up to the group, which charges $2,500 a year for membership.

However, this latest initiative is likely to attract some criticism from environmentalists who have argued that with several high-profile green IT coalitions – such as The Green Grid and the Green Technology Initiative – already established, the development of further groups and potentially conflicting best practices could serve to inadvertently confuse IT managers.