The goals of the program are to give organizations a greater incentive to improve the energy efficiency of their data centers, and to give them a way to track the results of efficiency initiatives over time, said Alexandra Sullivan, an EPA program engineer who described the effort at a recent green IT conference.
Data centers that participate in the EPA program will use an online tool that ranks their efficiency on a scale of 1 to 100. Those that score 75 or higher can request an audit from the EPA, which awards qualified organizations the Energy Star certification.
If you are an Enterprise IT or Facilities person – is this a kiss of death? I mean – is another “thing” that you will now have to deal with? Maybe you’ve just got PUE figured out, either by manually doing some readings or a little sub-metering and/or wireless-networked sense points and you thought all was good. Nope – it’s time for a new thing that will require you to use an “on-line” tool to determine you’re ranking and then if you hit the magical 75 – you can request an audit! So – are you the kind of person who likes to request “audits”? I can’t remember the last time I requested an IRS audit – and somehow this seems just as painful.
Let’s hope not. I mean the real deal here is to help folks benchmark their data centers – gather a level of visibility around usage/cost/efficiency and in the end reduce energy consumption, increase existing capacity while maintaining or increasing service reliability. Right?
So I hope this process will be friction-less for the data center early-adopter. We need folks to embrace this program, gain benefits in realizing their current in-efficiencies and prove to the rest of the F5000 that it is possible to clean up the data center and do a good thing.
Thought #1 It would be really interesting for the EPA to publish the top 500 Energy Star certified companies.
Thought #2 It would be really interesting to only award federal business to companies in the 85+ score category.
Energy Star is coming… please don’t let it be a Death Star and destroy or de-rail your greening efforts…
