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GCN Home > 01/22/07 issue

Data Centers: The heat is on

EPA’s Energy Star program could focus on power consumption in the server room

By Drew Robb, Special to GCN

Data centers aren’t much different from automobiles, at least when it comes to energy usage. While a small percentage of a car’s fuel goes into moving people from place to place, the vast majority of its energy goes into moving the car itself or is given off as heat.

In a data center, less than 50 percent of the electricity goes to the servers’ CPUs, and some of that is converted to heat. The rest of the electricity is used to run other components of the servers, the center’s cooling system, or is lost in power supplies, uninterruptible power supplies and switches. While this is a problem for a data center manager trying to stay on budget, it is also becoming a national concern.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department are focusing on data centers as an important and emerging sector in the economy from a standpoint of energy consumption, said Andrew Fanara, product development team leader for EPA’s Energy Star program.

“All federal departments rely on the management of data to fulfill their missions, but also, those data centers are critical in facilitating our competitive economy,” Fanara said.

Data centers, however, come at a high cost in terms of energy independence and environmental damage. According to Jonathan Koomey, Osman Sezgen and Robert Steimetz of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, data centers in California alone consumed between 2,000 and 3,000 gigawatt hours of electricity in 2001, and that figure has risen considerably since then. (One gigawatt, according to California’s Consumer Energy Center, provides power enough for 1 million average homes.)

Congress took note this year, and last December passed HR 5646, which would require the Energy Star program to analyze “the rapid growth and energy consumption of computer data centers by the federal government and private enterprise.”

But EPA didn’t wait for congressional action. It was already working on ways to cut such power usage.

“We are officially starting our research to determine if an Energy Star category for servers will be effective in the marketplace,” Fanara said.

Awarding Stars
EPA launched the Energy Star program in 1992 as a means of saving energy and cutting greenhouse emissions. It has a staff of about 100 and covers three areas: homes, commercial buildings and electrical/electronic products. The program involves certifying products as being energy-efficient as a means of encouraging their purchase.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Hardware, Storage Management, Management, IT Management



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