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Jay Dietrich, Program Manager of Climate Stewardship and Energy at IBM and chair of the TGG SERT Analysis working group, will be examining how emerging server and storage product energy efficiency regulations based on idle power could derail the drive for a greener data centre industry.  

When pursuing any goal, choosing how to measure progress is vital. Good metrics align your output with your goals. Bad metrics take you in the wrong direction, and often produce unintended consequences.

Active efficiency, as measured by workload delivered per unit of energy consumed, is generally accepted as the best measuring stick for improving server energy efficiency. It takes into account workload cycles that sometimes (rightfully) render a server idle, providing a holistic perspective on the relationship between server performance and power use.  Vitally, the metric recognises that most high performance servers have higher power demand with proportionally better performance as compared to lower power, lower performance servers. 

Despite this, regulators in both the US and Europe are often fixated with idle power. As a metric, idle power is narrow and circumscribed, looking primarily at individual power units without consideration of workload capacity and speed. As a result of this, idle power doesn’t provide a good measure of server energy efficiency.

In this roundtable, Jay Dietrich (IBM) will look at how emerging regulations based on the idle power metric could hamper our drive to create a more sustainable data centre industry:

• What pieces of regulation are coming into play?
• What could their direct impact be on the data centre supply chain?
• What implications will this have on our ability to create a more sustainable data centre industry?

Please register here if you are interested in learning more.