Earth Day in the Data Center

A thousand years ago or so, the yardstick came to into existence. It was not a great scientific breakthrough, but more of an imperial edict by King Edgar of Saxony. It was literally a wood stick that was based on the length from the tip of his nose to his thumb. It was kept in the castle and became a standard of measurement. This standard was propagated by citizens of the kingdom coming to the castle to cut their own sticks to the same length as the “official” yardstick.

In the next century King Henry the First declared that going forward it should always be "the distance from the tip of the King's nose to the end of his outstretched thumb". Needless to say the size of the yardstick changed with each king. It took several more centuries to finally become a true metric.

The first Earth Day was 40 years ago on April 22, 1970. Back then no one really gave any thought to a data center’s impact on the environment. We were (and still are) mostly focused on air and water pollution. But today, we have an entire day of online events dedicated to conserving energy in the data center that are subsets of an entire's week's worth of content related to the role of IT in making the world a greener place to live. There are even sessions that address what specific types of tools IT organizations should embrace to proactively manage energy usage in the data center.

Of course, the first real attempt to address energy issues in the data center came in 2007 when The Green Grid created the Power Usage Effectiveness “PUE” measurement for data centers, which was its first attempt to define the new metric. Beginning in June of this year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will have created a new “yardstick” in the form of the EPA’s Energy Star for Data Centers program, by which the energy efficiency is measured and compared to other sites. It too is the first, “official” yardstick.

According to the EPA, this yardstick will also be a changing standard, since it will continue to be updated as information is collected via ongoing reviews of the average of U.S. data centers energy efficiency (for the moment it is voluntary to apply and submit this information to the EPA, but like many other EPA programs it could become a regulation with the stroke of a pen).

Data center energy monitoring and management was once an ignored issue by the industry. The only metric that was discussed was how many “9s” of availability a site claimed or what Tier Level (1-4) it was design for. Now that energy has become one of the major operating expenses (and in some cases it is even a constrained resource), measuring and optimizing energy efficiency has finally appeared on the radar scope of management.

Many manufacturers, both new and well established players, have come out with a cornucopia of products to measure, trend and calculate PUE, Capacity, Carbon Footprint, and “manage” energy usage, and in some cases they claim to help optimize the efficiency in the data center. About the only thing missing (so far) from these new “yardsticks” is the ability to automatically negotiate (and purchase) energy rates from multiple utilities in real-time (anyone remember Enron?).

So stay tuned and watch for new vendor tools and new “yardsticks” from the EPA and The Green Grid.