As part of its efforts to create an Energy Star certification for datacenters, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is holding meetings with the storage industry and seeking comments in order to move forward with draft standards for enterprise storage systems. Unlike standard appliances such as printers or network devices however, the task is necessarily complex where storage devices are concerned.

For one, it is far more common to find redundant power supplies installed in storage systems--since its failure could well be catastrophic to continued operations.

In addition, factors such as RAID configuration, controller hardware, controlling software, whether the system is in an active or idle state, as well as the type of storage drives used, all play a part in influencing energy efficiency.

So if you have any feedback or contributions to make, do send them to EPA by May 21.

For more on this story:
- check out the article at Computerworld 

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