A group including representatives from major chipmakers and server manufacturers, as well as the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Stanford and the Uptime Institute, have announced plans to release a second draft of an energy efficiency standard for 1U and 2U rack servers on 2 November.
The energy standard would measure a server's performance under different workloads compared to how much power the server draws on those jobs. If approved, data center managers conscious of how much power their servers are drawing could use the standard as one factor in determining what systems they want in their facility.
The 10-page draft protocol, released in August this year, is available on the EPA's data center site.