Two of IBM's new Power7 servers have received the EPA's Energy Star designation for their energy efficiency. The Power 750 Express and Power 755 are the first four-socket servers to get the designation, IBM says. IBM launched its Power7 platform in February.
Two of IBM's new Power7 servers have
reached Energy Star status, making them the first four-socket systems to meet
the federal government's criteria for energy efficiency.
IBM officials said April 1
that the Power 750 Express and Power 755 models met the standards outlined by
the Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA has created standards for a range of products-such as
PCs, televisions and refrigerators-that determine whether the appliances are
energy-efficient enough to sport the Energy Star logo. The EPA spent more than
two years working with a host of technology vendors, including IBM,
to develop Energy Star guidelines for servers and storage devices.
During that time, businesses were becoming more conscious of rapidly
rising power and cooling costs, and environmental regulators began seeing data
centers consuming an increasing large amount of power.
In recent years, data centers have accounted for as much as 1.5
percent of the energy consumed in the United
States, according to the federal government.
In the meantime, businesses seeing a large percentage of their IT spending
going into running and cooling their IT infrastructures began putting pressure
on processor makers and OEMs to find ways to make their products run more
efficiently.
According to IBM officials,
Power 750 Express and Power 755 systems offer four times the performance of the
older Power6 servers for the same price, while being three to four times more
energy efficient.
The Power7 chips offer a number of features that enable IT
administrators to dynamically optimize power usage, including Power Saver Mode
or Dynamic Power Saver Mode, which can cut processor speed in half to reduce
the amount of energy used or optimize the power used by the processor and
system by modulating processor voltage and speed.
The Processor Core Nap feature puts the chip core into a
low-power mode when idle, and Processor Folding takes the number of processors
needed for current workloads and puts the unused processors into Nap Mode.
The Power7 servers also automatically turn off pluggable PCI adapter slots
that are empty or unused.
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