Europe and the IT industry seek energy-efficient data centres

Stephen Withers
Monday, 26 February 2007 10:57

Your IT - Home IT

The European Commission may ask data centre operators to become more energy efficient, and the IT industry - including recently formed body The Green Grid - is stepping up to the plate.

The idea of a voluntary code of conduct will be discussed at a meeting of the EC's Renewable Energies Unit in London this week. Data centre operators and designers, along with hardware manufacturers are expected to attend the meeting.

Other efforts to data centre power consumption are already underway. Late last year, the US Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) was asked to study the issue. (The EPA is the body behind the Energy Star program addressing power consumption by PCs and other devices, but not servers.) And an industry-based body - The Green Grid - announced today its initial plans for the issue.

Three white papers were released by The Green Grid today, one explaining the importance of energy-efficient data centres, another providing guidelines for energy-efficient data centres, and the third suggesting metrics for energy efficiency.

The Green Grid members include Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), American Power Comversion (APC), Dell, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Intel, International Business Machines (IBM), Microsoft and Sun.

Part of the problem is that it doesn't make much sense to compare power consumption without also comparing the amount of work being done. If one server uses 10 percent more power than another, but also does 20 percent more processing, that's a good thing.

The non-profit Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC; perhaps best known for the SPECmark benchmarks for PCs) is already working on performance benchmarks appropriate for servers. For example, it updated this month the SPECjAPPServer2004 benchmark for Java 2 Enterprise Edition servers.