Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Server efficiency metrics: Who should publish them?

I'm working on a follow up story to the recent finalization of the server efficiency metric. And in the spirit of Election Day I'm putting this to a vote!

The basic premise: The EPA and a group of engineers got together over the past year to decide HOW to measure energy efficiency against performance on 1-2 U servers. But no one has stated where these numbers will be published. The EPA says it is encouraging vendors to provide numbers business-to-business to customers, but it would also welcome a publicly available side-by-side comparison from a third party.

I'm taking a poll of experts and participants to find out what organization should do the testing and publish the info.

Would you be willing to venture an opinion as to which of these groups below, if any, would be best suited for publishing side by side comparative data on the various server models? And why?

Who should publish the information?
  • AFCOM (Data center manager's professional association)
  • ASHRAE (Cooling engineers, data center metrics already under their belt)
  • LBNL (Lawrence Berkley National Labs -- already studying data center efficiency)
  • IBM/HP/Sun, et al (publish their own numbers)
  • IDC/Forrester-sized analyst firm
  • Uptime Institute
  • Infrastructure vendor (APC or Liebert for example)
  • EPA/Energy Star
  • SPEC (already working on its own efficiency standard, supposed to harmonize with this EPA standard next year)
  • PG&E

    And would it be free to the public or is this the kind of research people are going to have to pay for?

  • 1 Comments:

    At 10:17 AM, Anonymous Erin said...

    Hi great readiing your post

     

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