(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The US Environmental Protection Agency (www.epa.gov) has finished the third draft of the Energy Star specification for servers, making it one step closer to creating a finalized Energy Star efficiency rating for servers, according to a report on IT Knowledge Exchange blog Server Farming.
Mark Fontecchio said in a blog post that the new EPA regulations will open for compliance to one to four-socket Tier 1 servers by February 1, and that Tier 2 servers will not be called upon for compliance until October of 2010. He states that blade servers were not included, nor were DC-powered servers, network and storage equipment, or server appliances; however, the EPA intends to address these products in the future with an add-on to the specification.
The EPA draft makes special note, according to Fontecchio, that non-profit standards firm Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (www.spec.org) is developing a new benchmark for blade servers, much like its release for volume x86 rack servers. The EPA intends to wait until SPEC releases its standard before releasing its own.
Fontecchio said the new specifications include power supply efficiency requirements including the stipulation that a multi-output power supply must be at 82 percent efficiency when the server is working at full capacity. The EPA also monitor idle servers power consumption, limiting single-socket servers to 60 watts, two to three socket servers to 151-221 watts depending on memory, and four-socket servers to 271 watts, with small allowances for extra components like hard drives.
However, the EPA and SPEC are not the only organizations concerned about power hungry networks. News site Gigaom (www.gigaom.com) reported that IT testing company Ixia (www.ixiacom.com), network hardware developer Juniper (www.juniper.net) and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (www.lbl.gov) partnered to create the Energy Consumption Rating Initiative (www.ecrinitiative.org) last week. The ECR is an “open standards-based project aimed at creating energy-efficiency metrics for network and telecom devices,” according to the report.
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