Energy Star for Data Centers - Does it really matter? - by Doug Mohney

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Jun 17 2010)

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   Last week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it would have a program for large stand-alone data centers and buildings that house large data centers to earn the Energy Star label.  It'll be Yet Another Ticket that data center operators can choose to lure customers in, but I'm not sure see if this will actually lower energy consumption anytime soon.

   To earn an Energy Star label, data centers must be in the top 25 percent of their peers in energy 0efficiency according to EPA's performance scale, using the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric.  A licensed professional is required to independent verify the energy performance of buildings and sign and seal the application document sent to the EPA for review and approval.  So far, so good.

   But the EPA says in its press release that data centers are expected to almost double energy consumption as a total percentage of U.S. usage over the next five years.  This jives quite well with some information I've seen from Verizon Business, who expect that corporate data is going to grow "exponentially" with a 20 to 40 percent annual -- yes, annual -- growth rate for storage.  If you start off with around 100 TB today, Verizon expects you'll need around 372 TB in five years.

   I find the EPA and Verizon Business data points scary.  A number of businesses and government agencies are trying to move into downsize/rightsize mode, shrinking the number of data centers, using virtualization to use significantly fewer servers, and getting rid of excess copies of data so you have few storage devices and spinning hard drives.

   EPA is going to hand out Energy Star on best PUE, so what looks like will happen is you'll have a much larger number of larger data centers in five years with 25 percent of them rated as "most efficient" -- rather than a steady or slowly growing number of data centers.  Does this make sense to you?

   And regrettably, EPA isn't throwing in a carbon rating; it would have been nice to see some brownie points thrown in for using green-er energy (i.e. wind, solar, Bloom Energy server, nuclear).  One would think that a less PUE-efficient (gaming) data center powered by renewables might be better than a better-PUE rated data center sucking down 100 percent coal power.

   Ah well, let the numbers games begin!

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