US Data Centers Wary of Sharing Energy Data With Feds

1sockchuck writes "The EPA has been seeking at least 100 data center operators willing to share data about their energy usage to help the government develop an Energy Star program for data centers. Thus far, only 54 data centers have signed up, which suggests that few data center operators are eager to tell the government exactly how much energy they are using. The EPA issued a report to Congress last year on data center power usage, and is already developing an Energy Star program to rate servers. Can a program designed to rank the energy efficiency of appliances and computer monitors be a useful tool in addressing the enormous energy consumption of data centers?"

Comments

Few?

[oodaloop]

So 54 data centers responded out of "over 100"? That seems pretty good to me. How many of the rest just didn't know how much energy they used, or couldn't be bothered to look it up?

Re:Few?

[Amouth]

saddly i know the power useage of one data center that would not be reporting in.. lets put it this way.. based on the farm usage they turn off power to other floors in the building.. not to conserve power but because the main line coming into the building is their bottle neck

Re:Few?

[oodaloop]

I think you're referring to reading comprehension skills, not math and reasoning as such. Flying in the face of /. norms, I read TFA again. There is no mention of how many data centers were queried, though their goal of 100 responses could be used to guesstimate. Also, it says the plan is 1 year old and the data centers need to compile 12 consecutive months of energy usage and submit it before June 1. How the 54 other companies compiled 12 consecutive months of data in 11 months is conveniently left out, but perhaps there will be more companies complying with the request closer to the deadline.

Transportation energy use is the key

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

We should stop conflating energy consumed at fixed locations from the energy consumed by the transportation sector. We have enough energy in the form of coal, nuclear power, tar sands, wind, solar, cow dung and what not. Sure, there are problems and pollution and different costs and benefits for each of these sources. But the one big advantage they have is that, they don't make us dependent on fickle foreign powers in unstable regions. We are 100% self sufficient in the fixed-point-energy consumption sector.

But it is a completely different story when it comes to the energy consumed in transportation. There is no viable alternative to gasoline for cars, diesel for trucks and kerosene for the airplanes in the near future. Nothing. And all the crude oil we import goes to transportation.

The politicians are clueless dumb idiots who go through the motions of doing something, on the crazy logic, "we must do something, it is something so we are doing it".

Re:Transportation energy use is the key

[jafiwam]

Well, you're right for now. While we're starting to develop alternative fuels...let's try to get past the ECO-freaks out there, that won't let us drill for our own oil, in our country!! China is drilling in cuban waters just off the coast of FL...why the fuck aren't we drilling in the lucrative oil fields offshore of FL, NJ, CA...?? I believe, it is because when the rest of the world is tapped out, there will still be quite a bit in "environmentally protected" areas that will be used to retain world superpower status long after everybody else goes back to riding behind horses.

It's a long term strategy.

Ignored like a credit card application

[EnOne]

There are probably at least Two reasons that this was ignored 1) The form letter from the Government was ignored like unsolicited credit card application. 2) The data center in question needs their people to work on projects instead of collecting information for said Government.

Yeah, that would be nice

[PIPBoy3000]

Our data center had a catastrophic failure last year when the generator test failed and the operators didn't notice they had no power until the UPS died 15 minutes later. Absolutely everything lost power, and we spent the day recovering systems from various messy states. The exception was our Tandem, used for our clinical system, which was kept alive by a series of D batteries powering the CPU. We used to make fun of those D battieries, but never again.

In any case, our data center is part of a larger facility and while it's easy to report on overall power use for the facility, it's mixed in with so much else that it's hard to get a good estimate for power use by the data center alone. As we found out the hard way, the UPS wasn't adequate for downtimes longer than 15 minutes. We've since made a big push to improve the UPS and reduce the number of physical servers in the data center (switching to virtual whenever possible).