Sustainable IT | Ted Samson » Plenty of green standards a'brewin'

February 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Plenty of green standards a'brewin'

TAGS: Green standards

Jeremy Kirk from the IDGNS has compiled quite a laundry list of groups from all over the map that are exploring standards for energy efficiency in the data center.

The European Commission, for example, is contemplating "codes of conduct" for energy efficiency for data-center operators.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which raised the Energy Star bar for PCs and notebooks last year, recently launched a six month study of power consumption in data center and potential conservation measures, as directed by Congress and approved by President Bush.

But it's not just government agencies contemplating eco-friendlier technology; the industry has green on the brain. A group of industry heavyweights including AMD, Intel, Sun, IBM, and Microsoft formed a non-profit consortium last year called The Green Grid, "an association of information technology professionals seeking to lower the overall consumption of power in datacenters around the globe," per its Web site.

Meanwhile, the non-profit group SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corp.) formed a server-efficiency committee last year. (Interestingly, many of the companies represented by SPEC are also involved in The Green Grid.) The group's announced goal was to come up with its first energy and performance benchmark early this year.

But that's not all: Yet another group, this one comprised of representatives from various companies (including those involved with The Green Grid and SPEC) as well as academicians, has already churned out a protocol "measuring energy efficiency in 1U and 2U rack servers." The group was supported by the EPA.

So from where I sit, there's good news and bad news here. The good news is, there's clearly a lot of interest in greener, more energy-efficient technology out there, both from the industry and the government. It's also good to see companies and government agencies cooperating, to a degree. After all, standards that suit everyone's means less foot-dragging when it comes time to enact them.

My concern is just how many divergent efforts are going on. It would be just a bit ironic (in the Alannis Morrisette sense) for these various parties to be wasting energy by simultaneously developing conflicting or even similar energy-efficiency standards.

Posted by Ted Samson on February 23, 2007 12:35 PM

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