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    Claus Schafhalter is executive level Management Consultant and owner of Sunogos - Change for the Better


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    Setting Goals Not Methods

    By Claus Schafhalter | April 14, 2010

    In a press release today Google is said to lead the charge against tougher energy effi­ciency stan­dards for data cen­ters. Google? Is this not the com­pany tout­ing green ini­tia­tives and try­ing to not be evil?

    It is worth to dig a lit­tle deeper into this issue. Data cen­ters house tons of heat pro­duc­ing com­puter equip­ment, and in order to run reli­ably data cen­ters need a lot of cool­ing. Data cen­ters con­sume lots of energy, on the one side to power com­puter equip­ment to gen­er­ate heat (okay, they con­sume energy to process data and gen­er­ate heat as a by-product), and on the other side to cool down the stuff. Our lean trained minds would gear our efforts to reduce the heat in the first place, thus sav­ing energy to drive the com­put­ers and sav­ing energy by using less cool­ing. And in all fair­ness man­u­fac­tures and data cen­ter own­ers try to go that route.

    Back to topic: An orga­ni­za­tion dubbed ASHRAE (Amer­i­can Soci­ety of Heat­ing, Refrig­er­at­ing and Air-Conditioning Engi­neers) pro­posed amend­ments to its effi­ciency stan­dard for build­ings deal­ing with cool­ing for data cen­ters. Google, and exec­u­tives from com­pa­nies like Microsoft, Nokia, Ama­zon, and oth­ers charge that these stan­dards pre­scribe how to do cool­ing (the method), as opposed to set­ting goals that need to be achieved regard­less of the method used. ASHRAE is said to man­date cer­tain equip­ment. The method (equip­ment) pre­scribed may not always be the most effi­cient or most effec­tive. And the man­date does not accom­mo­date inno­va­tions that could be much more envi­ron­men­tally friendly.

    Here is my take: As an orga­ni­za­tion with the power to reg­u­late, set goals and cri­te­ria. Let inno­v­a­tive engi­neers come up with the best meth­ods how to accom­plish these goals. Pre­scrib­ing meth­ods might be good for a few equip­ment man­u­fac­tur­ers, pre­scrib­ing (rea­son­able) goals will have a much more pow­er­ful impact in reduc­ing power con­sump­tion in data centers.

    Claus Schafhal­ter, Man­age­ment Con­sul­tant @ Suno­gos

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    Topics: News, Sustainability Concepts, Sustainable Technology | No Comments »

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