EPA finalizes Energy Star for Servers

The first round of requirements for Energy Star compliant server hardware is out, and the EPA is already in the planning stages for a more rigorous set of requirements set to be released late next year.

The Energy Star program, a joint project of the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy, rolled out its first set of standards for server products. The new standards, which were developed through consultation with major players in the industry, will apply to single and dual-socket servers. Manufacturers that have a product that meets or exceeds these energy efficiency measures will be allowed to place an Energy Star label on it, providing purchasers with a convenient way of picking hardware that won’t bust their power budget.

The relevant documents have been posted on the relevant portion of the Energy Star website. They include a memo that describes the production of the new standards, a spreadsheet for companies interested in certifying a product, and a document that describes both the energy use allowed in a compliant server, as well as plans for an upcoming iteration of that will expand the range of hardware covered.

The hardware that’s not included in the server-room standards is pretty substantial. This time around, the hardware left out includes blade systems, fault-tolerant servers (those with duplicate hardware), server appliances, and networking and storage hardware. Also omitted is any server that has more than four sockets for processors (the number of cores per processor never enters the equation). A lot of that is expected to change with the release of the next standards, termed Tier 2, which are expected to be released late next year. Things listed as under consideration for Tier 2 include blades, servers with more than four sockets, and various server appliances. There’s also consideration of developing a standard based on the energy use per unit of work performed.

All of that is in the indefinite future, however; the new standards are here now. These include specific efficiency numbers for the item that’s often the biggest power draw, the power supply itself. These vary based on the load of the server and the capacity of the power supply, but start at 70 percent energy efficiency, and rise above 90 percent in some circumstances.

For single and dual socket servers, the key item is idle power. For a base system with 4GB of RAM and a single hard drive, a single-socket server should burn 55 watts or less when idling; a dual socket system is allowed to go up to 100 watts. Servers with dedicated management hardware are allowed to go a bit higher. For standard hardware beyond this minimum system, every component increases the power allotment: a hard drive is worth eight watts, each additional power supply is worth 20 watts, each Gigabit ethernet port is worth two watts, and so on.

For four socket servers, there’s nothing like these hard numbers. Instead, the server must have any hardware power management features turned on in the BIOS and enabled by the operating system they ship with. They also need to have the ability to provide feedback on power use to their owners, including power consumption, air temperature, and CPU load.

So far, the standards are pretty limited, but they’ve undoubtedly been useful, both in terms of starting to give Energy Star a presence in the server room, and in terms of starting the industry-government cooperation needed to continue and extend the program.

Cost of corporate desktop power mismanagement: $2.8 billion

Over the past several years, the companies that run large data centers have become extremely energy conscious, as the price of electricity has forced them to measure and reduce the amount of power they burn through. Server farms are obvious targets for efficiency measures, as the energy use occurs in one place and the hardware is relatively easy to manage. But data centers are far from the only place where organizations host their computing equipment; although individual desktops may be widely distributed, they’re often quite numerous. A new survey attempts to put a price tag on the lack of energy-management practices in the desktop computing segment and comes up with a figure of roughly $2.8 billion wasted in the US alone.

As in many cases where there’s an eye-popping dollar figure involved, the report is using the figure to try to convince its readers to take the matter seriously. In this case, the data was crunched by 1E, a company that sells energy management software for corporate PCs. The company is using it as part of an energy awareness campaign that it is undoubtedly hoping will increase the use of its products. Most of the figures, however, like average price for power in the countries involved, are pretty easy to check, so 1E has little to gain by massaging its numbers. The report is liberally sprinkled with footnotes that describe where its authors obtained various figures as well.

What is more likely to be problematic is the source of employee-behavior data when it comes to desktop computer use. Those numbers come from an online poll performed by Harris Interactive in the US, the UK, and Germany. Harris focuses on this sort of polling, and presumably does it well, but the method will inevitably involve a degree of self-selection and demographic skewing within the population that responds. With that caution out of the way, none of the self-reported behavior derived from the polling looks unreasonable, or even unexpected.

The most basic numbers indicate that a significant majority of employees use a computer at work–just under three-quarters in the US, and nearly 80 percent in the UK and Germany. Of these users, only half shut the computer down when they leave work at night (the rates are slightly higher in Europe). Based on these figures and typical energy use and prices, 1E generated typical numbers for a 10,000-employee company in each of the three countries it surveyed: $260,000 for a US-based company, £168,000 ($244,000) for the UK, and euro-285,000 ($386,000) in Germany. That’s a lot of potential savings left on the table.