By Stevie Smith Aug 9, 2007, 14:19 GMT
A recent energy efficiency report presented to U.S. Congress by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has this week been backed up by advisory guidelines set down by the Green Grid, a wide-ranging consortium of technology companies and end-users all focused on enhancements in data centre energy efficiency.
More pointedly, the EPA’s report to Congress outlined worryingly that data centre energy consumption doubled between 2000 and 2005, and is expected to double once again in the next four years – at an annual cost of approx. $7.4 billion USD without the implementation of focused energy efficiency measures.
Strengthening the EPA’s calls for increased energy efficiency throughout the country’s data centres, Green Grid has outlined a blue print of applicable and viable solutions that would help to significantly improve related efficiency levels, reports InformationWeek. These "deliverables" would include the identification and placement of standards, metrics, and best practices in order to ensure better data centre energy usage.
John Tuccillo, Green Grid member and vice president of American Power Conversion Corp., suggests that the implementation of these measures would, of course, be largely dependant on the specific systems being utilised within any given data centre – be they Web 2.0 or high-performance enterprise applications.
Green Grid’s outline for enhanced efficiency includes specific goals to be reached before the close of the year, which includes a proper evaluation of how best to apply current technological advantages in order to achieve improved efficiency in US data centres.
The EPA’s report also offered up a number of similar guidelines that would see modern technological know-how and design tasked to help curb the loss of unnecessary energy in servers that are sitting idle without regular (90 day) access. Specifically, the EPA claims annual energy usage in national data centres can be cut by as much as 25 percent with the proper application.
Your Talkback on this Story