Australian Energy Rating System for Data Centres

Yvette D'Ath, Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, launched the NABERS for Data Centres, 8 February 2013. This is claimed to be the world’s first performance-based rating tool. The National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS) is a set of tools and accreditation developed by the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage (OEH) on behalf of all Australian governments. The latest tool is for rating the energy efficiency of data centers. There is a data centre efficiency self-assessment tool for free on-line use, fact sheet, guide and Rules for collecting and using data. In addition there are data centre energy saving tips and one day Assessor training course.

The NABERS IT Equipment rating tool is the world’s first performance-based benchmarking tool to compare the energy associated with the IT equipment capacity within a data centre. Experience in developing the NABERS Energy for data centres rating tools has shown that Australian data centres have limited energy monitoring and sustainability reporting. As a result NABERS has focussed on developing simple, measurable benchmarks based on the most readily accessible data, while maintaining a robust measure of
energy performance to ensure the rating is relevant and useful for industry. An IT Equipment rating measures features that are closely related to the primary functions of a data centre (processing, storage and networking) and that all data centres provide, regardless of how they provide them. Given the current limitations in energy reporting and data collection by industry; difficulties in accessing useful work and energy consumption; and the requirement to ensure the metrics fairly represent all types of data centres functions; NABERS has developed two IT Equipment metrics:

• Processing capacity – measures the sum of the number of server cores multiplied by clock speed in gigahertz (GHz), and
• Storage capacity – measures the total unformatted storage capacity in terabytes (TB).

The NABERS performance benchmark model predicts the industry median greenhouse gas emissions for a given amount of data centre processing and storage capacity. This means that if a data centre consumes more energy than the benchmark model predicts, the site is less energy efficient than the industry median (set at 3 stars), while if it consumes less energy it is more efficient than the median. ...

From: NABERS Energy for data centres: Rating Your Data Centre Energy, National Australian Built Environment Rating System, NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, February 2013