APC sets efficiency standards

Datacentre equipment maker first to publish energy efficiency standards for all products

Datacentre infrastructure vendor APC is to provide customers with an electrical efficiency breakdown for all its products, in an effort to curtail spiraling power consumption.

APC's senior vice president for innovation, Neil Rasmussen, said he believed the move was an industry first, and would be welcomed by customers.

"Today, getting detailed efficiency data for all the products you use is incredibly hard. When we buy transformers from other vendors, we can't get the data, so we've had to measure it ourselves," he said.

The information, including a consistent format for ratings, will be published on APC's website. This will allow datacentre designers to predict the overall performance for a number of systems, APC claimed.

A number of industry groups, such as The Green Grid (of which APC is a member), have been working on producing energy efficiency standards for equipment. But disagreement over how to measure energy efficiency persists, and the publishing of industry-wide standards may yet be some time off.

So, while endorsing this work, APC decided "it was more important to just get the information out there", said Rasmussen.

"If different standards emerge further down the road, we'll happily make the changes," he added.

Meanwhile, APC has integrated its infrastructure management platform, InfraStruXure Central, and building management tools from TAC along with IBM's system management tools, to provide datacentre managers with greater insight into how individual components will impact business processes.

When an incident, such as a cooling failure, occurs, business leaders are really only interested in how that will impact processes, said Kevin Brown, vice president of datacentre marketing at APC.

The response for a cooling failure that impacts a file and print server is completely different from one that affects a payroll one, he said.

APC will also be releasing a new version of InfraStruXure Central in the Q3 2008, which will allow datacentre managers to monitor non-APC equipment from the console.