Here Come The Feds
In December 2006, Congress directed the Environmental Protection Agency to report on the power usage and growth of data centers and enterprise servers. From that study, the EPA and the Department of Energy have launched two major initiatives that will affect all IT professionals. The first is an Energy Star rating for data centers. The EPA has signed up more than 120 data centers to assist with the collection of statistics that will serve as the basis of the rating. The goal of all this is to create a standard energy efficiency benchmark--think of it as a miles-per-gallon measurement for your data center. Energy Star ratings also are in the works for servers: The EPA is working through the process of creating these, with the biggest issues revolving around the measurement and rating of idle power consumption.
However, nearly all major vendors, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, have raised concerns regarding how the Environmental Protection Agency will rate and rank power consumption. In addition, the standards won't factor in virtualization platform or vendor power management systems.
The EPA says it would be too difficult to write technology-neutral requirements, and the actual power savings would be heavily dependent on user configuration. The agency will require manufacturers to report power management features and virtualization capabilities as part of standard information reporting requirements when the standard is finally ratified, likely by the end of the year.
Judging by comments left on the EPA's site by major manufacturers, however, we get the sense there's no likelihood vendors will press the EPA to move quickly. Public comments are all very formal and polite, but lots of "strongly disagrees" and "mistakes will be made" pepper the carefully crafted letters. It's a bit like a royal family chat room: "Pardon me, but you don't know jack about blade servers, sir."
Ratings Matter
Why the big emphasis on ratings? The environmentalist in the crowd will point out that a standardized rating lets folks share best practices and compare their efficiency to better protect the environment. And the libertarians will be just as quick to point out that a standard rating of a data center sets the required foundation for creating a carbon tax or other type of fee system for inefficient energy consumers.
But should the government be involved in such a program? Our survey group was sharply divided on the effectiveness of this type of initiative, with 20% saying it's absolutely necessary and 17% saying absolutely not.
Whatever your stance, one thing is for certain: While the process is slow, it's steady and eventually will result in measurements, which are often a precursor for caps and fees. So whether you like ratings or not, you better get a plan in place.
In our Green IT report, at greenit. informationweek.com, we'll sort out the current green landscape and see where your peers are today. This snapshot will help IT decide where they can realistically be in a year, and look ahead to what's on the horizon. We also provide guidelines for embarking on a conservation program, tips on ways to get end users and business leaders on board, and metrics to measure success.
Mike Healey is CTO of GreenPages and has more than 20 years experience in technology integration. Write to him at [email protected].
