Modius Data Center Blog

In 2007, the “Energy Independence and Security Act” was passed by congress and is sometimes referred to as “HR6” (see below). In this energy efficiency Act, Section 453 is a section dedicated to the application of this Act to the datacenter and the timeframes specified for doing so.

In general, the Act identifies a national goal by the year 2011 for all corporations to fully understand their energy consumption with some level of granularity. Now what is important here is that the Act appears to have raised some significant awareness across all ranks and corporate executives (“CxO”) that energy consumption is not only the largest (and rapidly growing) component of IT spending, but the details of this usage almost entirely an unknown. Assuming the likely scenario that the relevant government agencies continue to push for energy efficiency and independence, the HR6 Act will be applied to ALL companies within the US, public or private, and will become a hot topical discussion item in all of the coming stake-holder and shareholder meetings alike. This will affect us all in 2011!

As a background, the Act considers any facility or portion of a facility that “primarily contains electronic equipment used to process, store, and transmit digital information” and which “uses environmental control equipment to maintain the proper conditions” to be a datacenter, dedicated or not. So, essentially any company with IT of any nature will be well advised to consider “HR6-453” very strategically and make plans towards its goals now.

The good news is that the Act as written today, is focused on “Eco-Reporting” of all IT and facility assets alone, rather than the control and active reductions of energy consumption to any prescriptive level. (Those recommendations and opportunities will come next). It articulates that baselines should be drawn up that reflect “datacenter efficiency holistically, reflecting the total energy consumption” for IT equipment and the facilities around which they are housed. It recommends that these baselines be documented, auditable and available for analysis or governmental submission (if requested) over the next year.

Towards this end, monitoring systems should be evaluated with specific projects identified and put in place THIS YEAR (2010) that have the ability to measure and view energy consumption for all IT related consumption, equipment, cooling, facilities, etc. These systems will have a unique opportunity today to be initially deployed for compliance with HR6 in 2011, and yet at the same time become the framework and basis for the next expected phase of (likely) mandated behavior which will deal with actually increasing the efficiency for the IT function across all companies in the US.

Additionally and in support of this and subsequent Acts, the EPA is busy developing metrics in their Energy-Star programs which will set efficiency KPIs associated with IT equipment. In short order, guidelines (and later mandates) will exist that require the active monitoring and reporting, usage of increasingly efficient equipment, cooling and facilities infrastructure equipment, and the continuous optimization of the entire IT ‘system’ for increased energy efficiency much like ITIL has been suggesting for years. Given the roadmap ahead, now is the time to start planning for the inevitable.

Mark Harris
Vice President, Product Management
Mark.Harris[at]Modius.com