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Macquarie wants standards to fight data centre 'green cloaking'

Tony Chan | March 25, 2009 | 0 Comments

Macquarie Telecom is calling for the Australian government to develop some kind of standard for measuring the environmental impact of data centres, in order to avoid what the company’s managing director for Hosting, Aidan Tudehope, calls, ‘green cloaking,’ by competitors.

The move by Macquarie follows the data centre recommendations by Sir Peter Gershon, former chief executive of the UK Treasury, who was engaged by the Australian government to perform an independent review of its management and strategy for its ICT requirements. As part of his report to the Minster for Finance and Deregulation, Lindsay Tanner, Sir Peter said the Australian government needed to develop a long term strategy to meet its data centre requirements instead of purchasing capacity on an ad hoc basis.

According to Tudehope, general manager of Hosting at Macquarie Telecom, the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) data centre strategy should consider an energy rating system similar to the star rating system used in the consumer electronics industry to ensure government data centres meet minimum criteria for energy efficiency. In addition, such systems should mandate continual improvement to foster ongoing investment in the most energy efficient equipment and operational practices.

“Only a clear and, most importantly, standardised approach to measuring data centre green credentials will bring an end to the current spate of ‘green cloaking’ by certain players in our industry,” said Tudehope. “This is a worrying trend whereby vendors are dressing their solutions up as environmentally friendly with claims such as being 50 per cent more energy efficient than any other data centre, without credible evidence to substantiate these claims.”

Pointing to standards in the security and operational excellence, such as ISO27001, Tudehope asked: “Why should energy efficiency standards be any different?”

“With similar initiatives getting underway in Europe and the United States, Australia has the opportunity to take another environmental leadership position with this strategy,” he added.

The US Environmental Protection Agency started an initiative last year to explore the possibility of developing a data centre version of the Energy Star rating system. Among the participating data centre operators in the US EPA program are AT&T and Equinix.

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