Does the government need to regulate green data centers?

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LONDON, ON, Aug. 28 /PRNewswire/ - Government needs to take a leadership role to stem the excessive power consumption curve by data center operators in North America, says Info-Tech Research Group. A recent U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report predicting data center power bills will grow exponentially over the next four years is no surprise given that enterprises lack guidelines on acceptable power usage, the IT research firm said.

“Greening of the large enterprise data center is just a pipe dream at the moment because there’s no motivation or support for IT departments to change,” said Aaron Hay, research consultant at Info-Tech Research Group. “The U.S. and Canadian governments need to work with data center operators, vendors, and industry associations to facilitate setting practical and actionable targets for immediate  eductions in data center power consumption.”

Check this out, it raises some interesting concepts about data center energy efficiency. Interestingly isn’t the cost of power and it’s availability already doing this? That for example in London there are only so many data center facilities with the space, power and cooling capacities available to meet modern requirements for grid, virtualization and hpc solutions. That the typical enterprise might already be at the 90% capacity route, and therefore they have to look at consolidation not just because of the environmental issues but to meet with the business need for an ever expanding IT need as and when the technology can earn revenue?