Are we Energy Start compliant, in the process, partially ?

[chuckk281]

Charles had a Energy Star question:

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Can someone brief me on our Blade’s status regarding

Energy Star compliancy (or other Green-like standards) ?

I can see out there that there is a v2 Draft for Energy Star that

does plan to include Blades but it’s not clear as to when this

could be ratified. Meanwhile what can we say as far as our

being “Green” or “Greener than …”

I’m responding to an RFP where this is a sensitive matter and

points are awarded in the evaluation process for our Performance/Watt

specs but also for our commitments in this area.

Obviously I know our story around PowerCapping, PowerManagement, I’m

looking specifically for some type of formal certification we might have

in the process (or that might have missed).

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Lauren replied:

I did want to point out that our power supplies are 80PLUS certified.  80PLUS is an external entity that units consumers, utilities, and manufacturers to promote and test energy efficient power supplies.  You can find a list of all 80PLUS certified power supplies at 80PLUS.org.  I don’t know who you are competing against in the RFP, but in the 230v category we do really well against Cisco and IBM.  I think we are at parody with Dell from a Blades power supply perspective.

Mike also replied:

Just to add to Lauren’s explanation below:

We use only Gold (92%) and Platinum (94%) efficient AC power supplies in our c7000 chassis.  IBM is the only competitor to offer a Platinum certified power supply – an option for only their BladeCenter H chassis (and they have only recently achieved this).

Dell and Cisco are only at Silver (90%) levels.

You can find the specs at www.80plus.com under the “230V Internal” tab.

Vincent also chimed in:

As far as Blade servers are concerned, http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=ent_servers.pr_crit_enterprise_servers still says:

the following product types are explicitly ineligible for ENERGY STAR qualification:

• Blade Systems including Blade Servers and Blade Chassis

About non Blade servers we do have some DLs listed in http://www.energystar.gov/ia/products/prod_lists/enterprise_servers_prod_list.xls

And Matt also had some info:

That’s correct.  Blades are out of scope of the  current version of the Energy Star Server spec (v 1.1.).  Version 2 might be published late in 2011 or early in 2012 and there is still a lot of info listed as TBD as of the last draft I saw. 

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Any other comments or questions?