By Ed Silverstein, TMCnet Contributor
Energy Star, a popular energy-efficiency comparison program offered by the EPA, was expanded this week to include data centers, in light of growing awareness that the centers are using up increasing amounts of electricity.
The Energy Star Program for data centers went live online on Monday, and officials hope that centers will use the comparative benchmarks to lower energy use and utility bills – leading to benefits for both companies as well as the environment.
“We expect a pretty high usage pretty quickly,” Mike Zatz, manager of the Energy Star Commercial Buildings program for the EPA, said in a telephone interview with TMCnet this week. “We developed it jointly with many, many players from the IT industry.”
Energy Star, which started with ratings of PCs back in 1992, was known for its energy efficiency labels for appliances as well as 13 building types, such as schools, offices and hotels. Then, about three years ago, the EPA was asked to submit a report to the U.S. Congress on the energy use in data centers.
Back then, 1.5 percent of U.S. electricity generation was due to data centers, and the government found out that the percentage was expected to double over five years. One study suggests that by 2012, data centers will be responsible for 3 percent of all U.S. electricity generation. Data centers are getting built with increasing frequency and are using higher-powered equipment.
Based on encouragement from commercial property managers, the EPA started working on getting benchmarks for data centers. It was not an easy task. For other buildings, the ranking system of between 1 and 100 was based on data gathered by the U.S. Department of Energy in something called the Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey. But CBECS did not have similar data for data centers.
So for 18 months, the EPA conducted its own survey and got data from 108 data centers across the United States. Diverse types of data centers took part, such as hosting facilities, corporations, and Internet facilities.
The EPA decided that coming up with ratings based on square footage didn’t make sense. It worked with other kinds of buildings but data centers are often densely packed with equipment. Instead, the EPA chose to use the PUE formula, Power Usage Effectiveness, which is a commonly used metric in the industry.
To take part in the Energy Star program, data centers enter information through Portfolio Manager, a software program that can track energy use.
A couple of interesting points came out during the data gathering, according to Zatz:
– Energy efficiency does not appear to be correlated to tier level of the data center. The tiers, which indicate the amount of redundancy in data centers, are ranked by one through four, with No. 1 being a data center that can be down for hours and No. 4 having no down time.
– Neither cold nor hot weather have a significant impact on energy efficiency in buildings.
With the new benchmarking program, data centers list their energy use based on a year of utility bills and a year of IT energy use, which comes from the output of the UPS, or Uninterrupted Power Supply. Based on the data entered, the online tool will calculate a score. To be eligible for an Energy Star label, the data center needs to get a score of between 75 and 100 percent. The data also has to be certified by an engineer or architect for the label recognition.
Data centers that take part in the program are restricted to stand-alone facilities and buildings that house large data centers. They must have raised floors and dedicated cooling systems. They are not server closets that are often found in office buildings. There is no required minimum number of pieces of equipment. Other Energy Star ratings exist for servers and computers, and the EPA is currently working with the IT industry to come up with specifications for ratings for data center storage and UPS systems.
Ed Silverstein is a contributing editor for TMCnet’s InfoTech Spotlight. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Marisa Torrieri
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