Stars For Data Centers?

摘要

The environmental protection agency is collecting monthly energy consumption data from about 240 data centers over the next year and considering whether to issue Energy Star specifications covering the overall energy-efficiency of data centers. But the EPA's energy might be best spent on gear-level efficiency specs. Benchmarks are needed as data centers hog evermore power. The EPA will get data on power consumed by non-IT gear (air conditioning, lighting, etc.) versus that used by IT equipment. "We needed to get this data, with the possible end result being: Can we do Energy Star for data centers?" says Andrew Fanara, the EPA's Energy Star program product development team leader. The volunteers-totaling 18 million square feet of data centers-have infrastructure designs of varying levels of fault-tolerance, redundancy uptime, and business continuity. But businesses might need the most help with what's in the data center, not the overall facilities.