Energy Star for green servers to come this year

Experts spar over way forward for power efficiency after Energy Star talks

Martin Veitch, IT Week 28 Feb 2007

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is aiming to create an Energy Star badge for power-efficient servers by the end of the year but disputes over components threaten the success of a new generation of datacentres.

At the Datacentre Energy Dynamics conference in London today, EPA spokesman Andrew Fanara said his organisation hoped to replicate the success of Energy Star for desktops, a spec and logo that quickly changed the power consumption of PCs when introduced in the early 1990s.

“If there’s one thing that sticks in my craw it’s that I really wish the industry would work on emitting less heat,” Fanara said.

“[The major datacentre contributor] is servers now [and] storage and routers later. We’re looking at Energy Star for servers and it will probably occur later this year. Obviously, we never want to write a spec that encourages efficiency at the expense of everything else but efficiency supports reliability.”

Fanara added that the EPA was also pursuing “a single benchmark to measure datacentres”.

However, other speakers said that attempts to curb power consumption were in their infancy because of a lack of collaboration between datacentre component makers.

“We [in IT] are a collection of disparate interest groups [so] whenever you’re listening to the debate make sure you have your bullshit filter well activated,” said Patrick Fogarty, director of engineering consultancy firm Norman Disney & Young.

“Telling the cooling on a chip to wind down a bit is hardly a dribble [in saving power]. There are losses in cabling and transformers, and power-supply efficiency is, frankly, crap,” said Fogarty. “Too many people say ‘our part is only a tiny part of the picture’. We need joined-up thinking and if we’d had it before we wouldn’t be in the crisis we’re in now.”

Even the bright hope of virtualisation software introducing server con solidation and efficiency is under threat through political infighting. Market leader VMware recently posted a white paper suggesting Microsoft is steering customers to its own solutions by restricting programmer interfaces and via licensing terms.

Unless changes are made at a more rapid rate, the capital’s datacentres are among the most at risk. Andy Deacon of the Greater London Authority said the number of days with a maximum daily temperature of 36 degrees Celsius or higher is projected to rise tenfold by the end of the century.

Tomorrow, the EC will hold a London meeting to discuss possible voluntary codes for datacentre power efficiency.

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