With datacenter energy consumption clearly on the U.S. government's radar, the EPA is now soliciting input from the public for developing an Energy Star standard for enterprise servers. With datacenter energy consumption clearly on the U.S. government’s radar, the EPA is now soliciting input from the public for developing an Energy Star standard for enterprise servers.Energy Star energy-efficiency standards already exist for various products, including desktop hardware and peripherals, as well as major appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines. The ambitious plan to develop standards for complex servers is another indication of just how conscious the Feds have become of the environmental impact of corporate datacenters.How this Energy Standard shapes up should be of keen interest to hardware vendors, as servers emblazoned with an Energy Star logo will prove alluring to datacenter operators who continue to struggle with the high costs of running and cooling their business-critical machinery. Fortunately, vendors and other interested parties will have a chance to weigh in. Andrew Fanara, program manager for Energy Star product labeling, sent out a memo (PDF) late last week asking “interested stakeholders” to help shape the ES Specification Framework for Enterprise Computer Servers (PDF). In its current state, the framework comprises three building blocks, all of which need to be further refined. They include: definitions, which entails explicitly describing which products are covered by the specification; eligible product categories, which identify specific product categories covered by the specification based on aforementioned definitions; and energy efficiency criteria and test procedures for captures the energy consumed by a server “during a realistic workload.”Ideally, the EPA says it would use an industry-standard procedure for measuring energy efficiency, “but if none exists, EPA would work with stakeholders to develop an effective test procedure, according to the current framework.” As it stands, EPA is monitoring work currently being done by Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) with the hope that it could serve as the basis for a potential Energy Star server performance metric. As noted by my colleague Tom Yager, devising benchmarks for server energy efficiency is a complex task, one that independent testers and other organizations are struggling with. Given the varying types of server and the varying workloads they carry, it can’t simply boil down to measuring, for example, how much electricity a server uses to perform X basic Web transactions. That would be like racing an unencumbered pickup truck against a hybrid at 60mph on racetrack and determining the hybrid was “better” because it got more miles per gallon. After all, the criteria would have to be different if, for example, you wanted to see which was superior, overall, for towing a heavy trailer: the hybrid or the more muscular pickup.Interested stakeholders have until Aug. 31 to respond to the EPA’s call for input on the framework. For more information, go to the Energy Star Web site. Technology Industry