With industry forecasts predicting that server and data center energy consumption will nearly double from 2006 to 2011 nationally, the U.S. EPA is encouraging organizations to improve data center energy efficiency.  To help organizations meet this goal, the EPA has announced updates to the energy efficiency requirements for a variety of Energy Star qualified products and equipment for data centers.

"All Energy Star labeled data center products will come with an associated Power and Performance Datasheet (PPDS) that lists product information and detailed test results," said EPA. "Energy Star recognizes that data center products are highly complex systems that require more than just a label to understand their energy performance. All data center products will be tested according to their specific Energy Star test procedure, the results of which will be reported in a standardized format in the PPDS."

In the update, EPA announced new spec process for Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS), Data Center Storage, and Servers V2.0.  

>>Read the entire artilcle now  

>>Top 12 Ways To Decrease Energy Consumption of Your Data Center

Emerson's LEED Data Center | Discover the strategies and technologies Emerson employed to maximize efficiency, scalability and reliability in their state-of-the-art data center.

It’s a question that comes up all the time. It’s also a difficult question to answer, because so many companies are secretive about their data center operations.

Emerson Network Power has put forth an answer to this question in “State of the Data Center 2011,” a report and infographic that summarizes data points about data growth, data center facilities and the cost of downtime. Emerson says there are 509,147 data centers worldwide, with 285.8 million square feet of space. Or in more familiar terms, there’s enough data center space in the world to fit 5,955 football fields.

> Read more now

What are the Promises, Challenges, and Imperatives of Data Center Infrastructure Management?   IT and facilities organizations have invested heavily in technology resources (people, processes, and tools) to manage the data center infrastructure, they have failed to achieve the promise and potential due to critical gaps between their data center facilities and IT infrastructure components. A new perspective on managing the critical infrastructure gaps is emerging that recognizes: * The importance of real-time data to understand the true capacity of available infrastructure * The criticality of interdependencies between logical and physical layers * The need for holistic management capabilities and visibility of IT and facilities infrastructures * The need for more powerful management tools that offer a rich, visual view of the infrastructure and can guide design and change management

As we roll into 2012 a quick recap of the data center related events and milestones that shaped our industry are in order. Fortunately the good people at Data Center Knowledge already compiled a very fine article “Top 10 Data Center Trends of 2011”. In addition, you should examine the excellent body of work compiled by The Green Grid in 2011 especially in the areas of sustainability (WUE, CUE, and soon materials ala MRR) and workload analysis.

If you are making a list of action items and projects to tackle in 2012, one that really must be on your list is to JOIN the Green Gird and attend the members’ forum, March 6 & 7 in San Jose, CA. Email me if you don’t find a membership level that fits your business needs so we can explore other options.

Back to 2011, perhaps some of the most significant developments are the multi-faceted approaches that organizations began to adopt and deploy in earnest towards not only data center energy efficiency but perhaps more importantly overall computational resource efficiency. With the latter, computational resource efficiency (my term), moving to the forefront as the rush to virtualization began to wane in 2011 with many organizations having hit the ‘wall’ of diminishing returns for their efforts. Not that virtualization is dead by any means, it isn’t and properly integrated to one’s DCIM (new for 2011 and rapidly gaining share of mind) deployment strategy will better enable IT and data center professionals to finally place an all-in energy, material resource, and man-hour allocation to each and every VM instance, application, storage bit, and even data I/O network traffic.

[Jack Pouchet, Emerson]

>> Read More Here 

At any given moment, millions of financial transactions, e-mail, and online videos may be coursing through the circuitry of one of the massive computer server farms that have proliferated in the Internet age.  In Alfonso Ortega's thinking, it's a lot of hot air. He's not talking about spam.  

The Internet generates a huge amount of waste heat, said Ortega, a Villanova University professor of energy technology.  By some estimates, 3 percent of the nation's electricity is devoted to computer processing and data centers, enough to light up a couple of states. The cost of cooling the equipment nearly equals the cost of powering the computers that process the bits and bytes, said Ortega, who is also the college of engineering's associate dean for graduate studies and research.

"People started to pay attention when companies said, 'Wow, unbelievable, we're now eating up half of our costs just to keep this thing cool,' " he said.

Ortega's Villanova team, along with a consortium of four other universities and four area corporate partners, were recently awarded a five-year, $3.4 million grant by the National Science Foundation to study ways to improve energy usage at data centers. The effort is formally called the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center in Energy-Efficient Electronic Systems.  

DVL is one of the four area corporate partners, at the forefront of the data center industry research.

> Read The Full Philadelphia Inquirer Story Here

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Great Ideas To Design A Better Server Room

How do you distribute power to your racks or pods in your data center?

There are several options for distributing power to racks using bus solutions, depending on the reliability needed by the end user. For some end users, having dual corded loads in rack served by a single power distribution system might be adequate for their reliability needs, while others will require true dual power system (2N) redundancy.

Here is what you will learn in this chapter:

• What are the reliability options for power distribution to racks and pods
• How to configure optimally power distribution to pods of racks.
• How to describe rack power distribution options in a consistent manner.