Stories about: Environmental Protection Agency

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has released the third draft of its Energy Star specification for servers and expects the final spec to be ready for use in February.

Networks will be the next frontier in energy efficiency if a program kicked off by router maker Juniper Networks and test-equipment vendor Ixia gains a wider following.

Environmental issues exposed by the media and driven by consumers have placed IT departments under pressure to develop "green" data centers. Factors including the reduction of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions in large data centers often provide the impetus for becoming green. A recent report issued by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) highlights the need for data center efficiency and demonstrates the increased pressure that IT departments are under.

Google's leadership on the Web stems partly from its powerful data centers, which allow it to provide lightning-fast search results while keeping energy costs to a minimum. The company has been mostly secretive about what goes on inside these giant computing factories, but on Wednesday it offered a peek at what it has been able to achieve -- on the energy side at least.

EBSCOhost is a fee-based research service that provides libraries in North America with access to more than 20 million articles from 20,000-plus journals and magazines, all driven from two data centers in the coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts. The data centers are owned and operated by EBSCO Publishing, the second-largest business unit of EBSCO Industries, which is one of the largest privately held firms in the Fortune 500. Michael Gorrell, senior vice president and CIO for EBSCO Publishing, explained that green IT principles are fundamental to helping the company keep up with sales growth averaging 26 percent per year for the last three years and storage growth of 200 percent annually, without equivalent growth in computing and data center infrastructure.

Businesses and home users can help the environment and save money at the same time by making better use of basic tools for desktop PC power management.

A Microsoft executive shared techniques the company has used, including new kinds of employee incentive programs and internally created automation tools, to reduce the energy consumption of its growing data centers.

So you work for a big company that has told you that it's your job to build a big data center in a big city. Good luck! More often than not your job may be impossible, and even where it might be possible today, the window is closing fast.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expects to introduce its first Energy Star rating for servers by the end of the year, although a more comprehensive system that measures actual workloads will take longer to develop.

Many discarded electronic devices in the U.S. wind up being dismantled overseas using crude and unsafe methods, partly because of a lack of markets for some electronic materials, e-waste experts told a congressional committee on Wednesday.

Green sells, whether the product in question is a hybrid car or a laptop computer. Tech firms know this.