August 23, 2006—According to a recent newsletter from the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), several major information technology (IT) companies recently teamed up with federal agencies and nonprofit organizations with the goal of reducing energy use in data centers, a growing component of the business sector. Data centers, which deliver information through Web and e-mail servers to personal computers around the world, can reportedly consume about 100 times more electricity than standard office buildings.
To help address the problem, AMD, HP, Sun Microsystems, and IBM founded The Green Grid, a global organization to reduce data center energy use by defining best practices in data center design, construction, and operation. The companies will work closely with the Alliance to Save Energy and the US Environmental Protection Agency to advance the new organization’s goals.
DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) announced a separate partnership with Sun Microsystems, Intel, Cisco, and others to power data centers using direct current (DC) instead of the traditional alternating current (AC) delivered by power companies.
Many electronic components actually run on DC power, which means that they require transformers to convert the AC power to DC, a process that uses energy and creates heat, explains LBNL. With funding from the California Energy Commission, LBNL and the IT companies have built a demonstration facility in Newark, California, that runs entirely on DC power. The participants hope to confirm an energy savings of 10 to 20 percent and improved reliability compared to today’s AC-powered data centers.
EERE reports that Carnegie Mellon University is taking a unique approach to the study of data center energy efficiency. The university has built a new facility that will be a functioning data center while also serving as a test bed for automation and energy efficiency. The 2,000-square-foot Data Center Observatory has the ability to support 40 racks of computers, which could consume up to 774 kilowatts of power.
