EPA drafting Energy Star standards for enterprise storage

IDG News Service - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is seeking comments on draft standards that will lead to Energy Star certification for enterprise storage systems, perhaps by the end of this year.

The EPA, which released Draft 1.0 of the standard on April 9, is holding meetings with the storage industry and seeking written comments by May 21.

The agency has developed Energy Star ratings for servers, but storage gear requires a different approach. For example, storage systems almost always have dual power supplies, whereas servers often don't. If the sole power supply on a server were to fail, its work could be shifted to another server. But if the same happened on a storage device, applications would lose access to the data on that platform until it came back up, said Erik Riedel, a member of the Storage Networking Industry Association Technical Council.

The EPA needed time to learn about those differences, said Riedel. Now it's mapping out a complex taxonomy of different types of storage systems based on size, performance and design, he said, and developing specific energy consumption requirements for Energy Star certification for each type.

This version of this story was originally published in Computerworld's print edition. It was adapted from an article that first appeared on Computerworld.com.