Data Center Efficiency – Maintaining Leadership in 2013

On Friday, I had the great pleasure of sitting in on the congressional briefing on “Data Center Energy Efficiency” that ITI hosted with Representative Anna Eshoo (D-Ca).  

As ITI’s Dean Garfield noted in introducing her, Representative Eshoo  “was doing data center efficiency before data centers were cool.”   Indeed, Eshoo and ITI worked on the 2005 bill that she and Congressman Mike Rogers (R-Mi) introduced, that was enacted in 2006, and that begat the oft-cited EPA “Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency PL 109-431."   She and Rep. Rogers followed up in 2008 with the introduction and enactment of Section 453 to the Energy Independence and Security Act.

Representative Eshoo and ITI intend to continue to lead on the issue of data center efficiency and sustainability, and so the briefing on Friday was a chance to both showcase a panel of experts and to get ready for taking further action in 2013.  

On the panel were:

John Tuccillo, VP, Schneider Electric, and Chairman and President of The Green Grid

Kathrin Winkler, VP and CSO, EMC Corp.

Pierre Delforge, Senior Engineer, NRDC

Dean Nelson, VP, eBay, Inc.

They made an exceedingly effective combination.  Tuccillo and Winkler walked the group through both the relevance and importance of data centers to the expanding digital economy and future sustainability, as well as the activities of The Green Grid and its members on data center efficiency and sustainability.Pierre spoke on the recent reports from the NRDC on server rooms and closets, utilization, and green cloud computing. Nelson was then able to show how it can all come together via eBay’s recent (and awesome) activities on its Utah data center.

As was again made clear at this briefing, ITI’s member companies are the global leaders in data center innovation and efficiency.   They intend to maintain this leadership. ITI feels strongly that there is much that the U.S. government and our industry can accomplish in collaboration in 2013.We will have more to say on this after January 1st.

Public Policy Tags: Intelligent Efficiency

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