Time to power down

Despite datacenters heating up as their electricity demands skyrocket, Hong Kong enterprises may find it difficult to implement "green" initiatives.

In a research note published November 2006, research firm Gartner predicts that traditional datacenters waste more than 60 percent of the energy they use to just cool equipment. The research firm also forecasts that half the world's datacenters lack the energy capacity to meet the power and cooling requirements of new high-density computing equipment by end-2008.

Lack of standards: red flag

The lack of energy-efficient labels for datacenter products is one of the major barriers to green adoption. "It would help if Hong Kong's EMSD [the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department] extends its energy-efficiency labeling scheme to datacenter-grade equipment," said Franklin Lau, deputy general manager, Group Information Technology Services, CITIC Pacific.

At present, EMSD's labeling scheme covers 17 types of products, but only six of them are office-use tools: photocopiers, multifunction devices, laser printers, LCD monitors, computers and fax machines. The scheme is on a voluntary basis only, meaning manufacturers can choose whether they want to provide information about a product's energy efficiency.

The government proposes to introduce a mandatory energy efficiency labeling scheme, but no datacenter gear will be included in the initial phase. According to the EMSD website, the department will include three products: room air conditioners, refrigerating appliances and compact fluorescent lamps initially.

The Energy Star program in the US (another voluntary energy-efficient labeling initiative for electrical goods which started in 1992) doesn't cover datacenter equipment yet. But the US government's Environmental Protection Agency is currently working with the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories to study ways to promote the use of energy-efficient servers. A specification could be in place later this year.

The absence of standards today is equally a hurdle, leaving corporations no objective ways to compare energy efficiency of different products. Currently, many vendors (including HP, IBM and Intel) report some energy efficiency figures, but these aren't directly comparable due to differences in workload, configuration, and test environment, according to a statement by Standard Performance Evaluation (SPEC), a US non-profit corporation formed to develop a standardized set of relevant benchmarks for high-performance computers. The organization is working on a performance-per-watt benchmark for servers slated for release later this year.

Another force working for change is the non-profit, vendor-neutral Green Grid Consortium, which seeks to establish standards for energy consumption in the datacenter. Its members include AMD, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Sun, and EMC.

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