October 2nd, 2009
U.S. DOE, EPA, IT pros: $1.1 billion could be saved with green, efficient data centers
A global consortium of IT professionals announced on Friday new tools and reports to assist data center managers and executives to improve the efficiency of their operations.
At a forum hosted at the New York Stock Exchange by NYSE Euronext, representatives of The Green Grid — a consortium that seeks to improve energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems worldwide — were joined by members of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Energy to discuss the challenges of data center energy management.
The Green Grid presented the results of a recent assessment of a mid-tier data center operated by the EPA, and said more than $1.1 billion could be saved by greening up the data center:
“If the EPA can deploy techniques that improve efficiency by 20 percent, they can save $15,000 per year in this one data center,” said John Tuccillo, Chairman of the Board of The Green Grid, in a statement. “IDC estimates that there are 75,000 similar-sized data centers across the United States, and if all of them could achieve that same level of savings, more than $1.1 billion in annual energy costs could be avoided in data centers across the country.”
The Green Grid said it is working with the U.S. Department of Energy in testing the DC Pro tool, an online software tool provided by the department to help industries identify how energy is being consumed by their data centers and determine the best places in which to save.
Planned enhancements to that tool include:
- Ensuring common energy metrics between The Green Grid tools, DC Pro and the Energy Star portfolio manager tool;
- Developing an IT energy assessment module;
- Creating a complementary Certified Energy Practitioner program where data center energy professionals would perform energy assessments using DC Pro.
What might be useful to data center and facilities managers are The Green Grid’s online free cooling tools and maps. The new tools are intended to help those in North America, Europe and Japan determine how much free cooling is available for individual data centers.
Using country and city names, data center managers can input their specific variables — local energy costs, IT load, facility load, etc. — to determine potential energy savings for individual facilities.
The tool also provides information about savings that could be obtained using water-side economizers.
The full list of countries with tools available: U.S., Japan, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.
Links to the tools:
Another tool introduced is the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) reporting tool, which attempts to ensure global consistency in reporting the split between energy flowing to IT equipment and facility operations.
The forum marked the beginning of October as Energy Awareness Month.
Andrew J. Nusca is an associate editor for ZDNet and SmartPlanet.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
