standards, what standards for green it? by Doug Moheny

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Sep 14 2009) Construction , Power and Cooling

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   Everyone is hot to build new green data centers, retrofit old data centers to be green, and sell the latest in green data center technology, but that doesn't really build a discussion that there are no hard and fast standards for what constitutes a green data center.  It is an issue which data center operators will freely admit – and one which will likely end up causing considerable marketing debate in the future.

   The U.S. Green Building Council has plenty of information on LEED, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Green Building Rating System. However, LEED is tuned for building design, as noted by the New York Times, not energy efficiency.  The U.S. Green Building Council is only now going back and collecting energy use information from all the buildings it certifies, including power and water bills.

   Net-net: You could have a data center in a LEED-certified building and it could be burning the kilowatts from simple things like not turning off the lights at night and other simple measures.  

   For data centers, cooling/air conditioning plus servers equal the cornerstones of green-ness, but there's no gold standard rating for a "Green IT" data center, such as power consumption by square foot or by rack – power density is going to be key. Nor are their any ratings for such things as buying carbon-offsets or using carbon-free power.  And it would be really nice if people started walking away from lead-acid batteries at a faster clip.

   Finally, if a gold standard green data center rating for power usage per rack/square foot was established, it would inspire competition for better performance among all data centers for bragging rights.  People would figure out the most optimum way to virtualize servers, pack them into a rack, keep them just cool enough to operate without a lot of breakdowns and put in power-efficient switches and routers.

   Hopefully someone will get around to establishing a standard (or, knowing the IT industry, standards), otherwise you are going to see lots of "green" data centers popping up everywhere, but no way to compare green apples to red apples.

   
   

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