Lack of industry standards slowing green datacenter initiatives 18 May, 2008 By Vanessa Ho

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"Companies are looking for leadership and clarity on how to define a green datacenter, how to design their green datacenter plans and how to put them into action," stated Jim Smith, vice-president of engineering at Digital Realty Trust. "In the past, the question may have been how to convince companies of the value of green datacenters. The good news is that is no longer a problem. Companies are convinced. The challenge is that the datacenter industry needs to step up and show the way with clear standards."

Some of the results of this year's survey reported that 51 per cent of companies have a green datacenter strategy, a decline since the 2007 study when 55 per cent of companies answered the question affirmatively. The study noted that this could indicate that corporate adoption of green datacenter strategies has stalled or taken a step back since last year.

Another finding noted that 82 per cent of companies said that there was no clear industry standard for green datacenters, an increase from 75 per cent in 2007, indicating that there is more ambiguity than clarity in the industry.

However, the Digital Realty Trust study noted that there was one area where there was broad agreement in terms of what elements an industry standard should comprise. The top two responses were that 94 per cent agreed that a standard should outline how to achieve efficient power usage (i.e. maximizing energy delivered to IT equipment by the facility) and 83 per cent agreed that a standard should also outline how to enhance HVAC systems to use energy more efficiently.

In the absence of green datacenter standards, Digital Realty Trust suggested that companies look into a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification as an alternative. More than 60 per cent of companies look to LEED general building standards as a model for their green datacenter initiatives. The Green Grid was also cited as a resource for green datacenter initiatives, indicating that the consortium is gaining visibility and momentum in the industry.

Of the companies that do have a green datacenter strategy, 82 per cent of respondents said they were taking a holistic approach that encompasses not only servers and other datacenter hardware, but also facility design and datacenter operations. This is nearly identical to the 2007 metric (81 per cent), indicating that companies understand the value of taking a comprehensive approach that maximizes energy efficiency by addressing not just the equipment in the datacenter, but the facility itself.

The study also noted that only 18 per cent of companies were planning to include carbon credits in their green datacenter plans, down from a figure of 25 per cent in 2007. This indicates that companies were focusing on directly reducing their datacenter energy consumption rather than displacing it through carbon credits solutions.

"One of the key ways we are [increasing data center efficiency] is by sharing energy efficiency data in response to customers and other end-user organizations who want data and benchmarks that educate them about the energy efficiency of competing facilities and about how their datacenter can support their corporate green strategy," said Smith.