With ratings for the Energy Star program set by the US EPA accepted as an international standard and followed in Australia, it is likely the new server standard would also be introduced locally, although the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts was unable to confirm this at the time of publication.
The EPA has been gathering input from server makers and other stakeholders for about a year. It quickly determined they would not be able to agree on a way to measure the "useful work" a server can perform with a given amount of power, Energy Star product development team head, Andrew Fanara, said.
"We all knew that in the long run, the most intellectually satisfying approach would be to marry energy consumption with work completed, yet admittedly we are not quite there yet in devising that holistic metric," he said in a recent interview.
The US EPA will meet with stakeholders at Microsoft's Redmond campus this week to try to hash out definitions for a second draft specification.
The US EPA is also working on an Energy Star rating for datacentres. Fanara said it will start to tackle storage equipment in the fourth quarter.
James Niccolai contributed to this article.
