The EPA has recently released several draft task reports on data center and server energy efficiency. The reports are posted on the Energy Star Web site and make for some fine, if technical, reading. The neat thing is that you can comment on these reports.The consumption of energy in data centers is a growing concern among industry and government officials; it's a regular black hole. In 2005, for example, U.S.-based data centers consumed 4.5 billion kilowatts hours, using over $3 billion in energy. This is according to a study funded by Advanced Micro Devices that was released earlier this year.
This is real democracy in action; if you are knowledgeable about these issues, EPA welcomes you to help populate this report. You can contribute data or information to this effort by contacting Eric Masanet at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The commenting period is relatively short (under two weeks) as the final report is due to Congress in June 2007, and according to Andrew Fanara, the program manager for EPA Energy Star, the team is not looking for a line-by-line critique of the draft. They want to know “if we missed anything significant, or caught or appreciated [all] the dynamics inside data centers that need special attention,” he said. Check it out, and see if they did.
What happens when an impossibly bright light enters an impossibly dark place? We are about to find out when the EPA releases version 4 of their EnergyStar standard in a few short months. It's the first time the standard has been updated in 15 years; needless to add, virtually every device out there currently meets the antiquated standard. Strange cough, strange cough.
The new standard should up the bar. For example, an 80 percent efficiency rating for PC power supplies is required, effectively killing off items such as this 2000 watt monster. It will also address standby power, which is currently set at a whopping 30 watts for PCs. Servers will be included in the specs, using a fairly complicated measurement protocol that attempts to address real-world performance. This will come in handy, as it is predicted that half of the data centers in the world will run out of power by 2008. And with legislators in the US and EU chomping at the bit to regulate these data centers, EnergyStar might be just in time. To save the (computing) world, that is.
The EPA is doing a bang up job on the new EnergyStar standard which will include servers as well. A lot of added gains in efficiency need to be attacked at the design and material levels, and IBM and Intel are doing just that with new materials like high-k; sounds like a breakfast cereal. EnergyStar is supporting that work but is also addressing the macro level such as the fact that half to two thirds of your servers' costs are hidden away in power and cooling.
Unbelievably, only half of the juice ever even makes it to the CPU! It's a one to one relationship - one kilowatt for the server, one kilowatt to cool it. Per kilowatt, that translates into $12,000 minimum for upstream hardware and another $3500 for site costs. It's hard to win the battle when you don't know the casualties count, but EnergyStar is definitely helping out with that.
