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  • Will The EPA Report Be A Catalyst?

    • By: Rich Miller
      August 14th, 2007

    Will the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report on Enterprise Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency, which was delivered to Congress on Aug. 3, be a turning point in the effort to improve the efficiency of data centers? Or will its recommendations be deflected or undermined by competing agendas within the industry? Last week I discussed the report with Eric Birch, executive VP of data center cooling specialist DegreeC.

    “We all tend to imagine a government reports will have more impact than it actually does,” said Birch. “But the EPA report is useful because it frames the debate effectively. They can help people understand the scope of the problem. I’m not sure what Congress will do with (the EPA report). I suspect stakeholders will start asking questions around this issue, and I think that’s a useful development.”

    The report recommends an Energy Star whole-building performance rating system for data centers, standardized performance metrics for data centers, and encouraging financial incentives for industry via tax credits and utility rebates. But the most concrete benefit will be at the web server level. “They are fairly explicit that EPA will propose an extension of EnergyStar to servers,” said Birch, who said it’s too soon to tell whether the agency will be able to extend the EnergyStar efficiency ratings to other data center equipment such as UPS systems.


    The matter of developing metrics for an entire data center is a trickier matter. The Green Grid has put forth a measure of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), which defines how much of a data center’s total power is used by the IT equipment (as opposed to distribution and conversion).

    “The PUE at least highlights how much energy is used on the servers, versus everything else,” said Birch. ” I think everybody would like to see good metrics, but I would be very surprised if there was a strong industry consensus in the next two to three years on metrics.”

    One of the challenges for efforts to develop a metric for facility-wide energy efficiency is the variety found among data centers. Comparing scores for different data centers will often turn out to be an apples vs. oranges comparison. But establishing a building-wide metric could be very useful for operators.

    “I may not be able to compare mine to yours, but I can see it when my (energy efficiency) is higher or lower than it used to be, and know that I should take a closer look at that,” said Birch.

    • Eric Gallant

    Posted August 16th, 2007

    I have a suggestion. This idea put forward by the EPA report and the Green Grid position paper that the power consumption of the entire building is a meaningful metric for data center efficiency is just silly. Maybe if your entire building is data center such a metric may have some usefulness. But what percentage of all data centers is like this? Even enterprise class data centers are only maybe 60% raised floor or less.
    I can measure the power consumption of only the data center portion of any facility fairly easily. Best practices already dictate that Data Center loads have a dedicated electrical distribution path. This distribution path can be metered. Why would I take into consideration the whole facility?
    Why doesn’t the EPA focus their efforts on developing a meaningful measurement of the computing and storage capacity of a data center? (Computing capacity)+(Storage capacity)/(Data center power consumption)= Data Center Efficiency.

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