By next week, the EPA will begin distributing to vendors and some users a final draft of the protocol, which outlines a way to measure how much power is used by a server tested against transaction-based benchmarks, such as the number of Web pages served per hour, according to several people involved in the effort.
"If you are a server buyer and you want to compare the energy performance of the servers from different vendors, you have a hard time doing that. The reason is that each manufacturer gives data in their own way, and the data given is not consistent between the vendors," said Jonathan Koomey, who heads the group developing the protocol and has advised the EPA on other energy issues. He is also a consulting professor at Stanford University and a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
The inability to compare how much energy servers use "is a problem for the customers of these manufacturers," said Koomey. Vendors recognize customer concerns "but until now they haven't known what to do about it."
Koomey believes some vendors may move quickly to use the server protocol, but large-scale adoption will take time -- and customer insistence. "It's going to take some pressure by the customers; if the customers really demand it, the manufactures will change really fast. "
One large customer that is already asking for energy data from vendors is Lehman Brothers. "I believe that standardized benchmarking will actually create a more competitive environment amongst vendors, thereby spurring on additional innovations for power efficiencies -- not only at power supply levels but CPU, storage and memory levels as well," said Salmon. "Even a small energy savings of 25 [to] 50 watts per server can translate into significant reductions in yearly operating expenses in addition to providing the ability to extend the life of existing data centers and their infrastructures."
Salmon also said that over the past two years, Lehman has reached out to all its hardware vendors, either directly or via peer groups, and "expressed our desire to see more products that are energy efficient without significant impact to processing performance. If a standardized protocol were to be established by any government or industry entity, Lehman Brothers would encourage or require our hardware vendors to adopt such a reporting protocol."
Hardware vendors participating in the effort include Hewlett-Packard Co., Sun Microsystems Inc., Dell Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Intel and IBM.
The initial measurement protocol is aimed at 1U (1.75-inch high) and 2U servers, and may be eventually broadened to include larger and more complex servers as the measurement evolves.
From the protocol, the EPA may develop a specification and possibly an Energy Star rating, similar to those used on household appliances. Those specifications aren't mandatory, but they detail what requirements companies must meet to qualify for an Energy Star rating, according to Andrew Fanara, team leader at the EPA's Energy Star program.
When the final draft is released, the EPA will seek test data from vendors and use it to determine whether to develop a specification. In some cases, the EPA has decided against developing energy specifications for certain products. For example, there are no ratings for clothes driers because there's little variation in energy consumption from one model to another. "If all the products consume about the same amount of energy, there would be nowhere to draw the line to separate the good performers from the bad performers," said Fanara.
If the vendor tests show distinct variations -- and the need for a specification and Energy Star rating -- that data could influence buyers. The federal government would probably only buy Energy Star servers, said Fanara. He noted that he has heard from other large users, especially financial services companies, who are interested in such ratings.