The other day, I came across an interesting article about a study that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was working on about data center energy consumption. The study is going to be used to provide the public with benchmarks to help IT managers compare their energy consumption to other data centers.

In a Report to Congress the EPA said that, in 2006, the nation’s servers and data centers used almost 1.5% of total U.S. electricity consumption. That’s huge - and from what I’ve seen, it’s not slowing down. In fact, several independent studies have found that anywhere from 1/3 to more than 2/3 of midsize to large businesses will build data centers or expand existing ones in the next few years.

We can tackle data center growth another day, but what I hope the EPA study will inspire is a newfound awareness that data center energy consumption is out of control and IT departments will continue to struggle if they don’t figure out the best way to introduce efficient technologies that allow for expansion but don’t drain the coffers dry.

The fact remains that at the end of the day that not many IT storage decisions are made because the solution is “green”; more likely it’s because of the time, money and resources that can be saved from an operations standpoint. And that’s perfectly fine. But perhaps the EPA’s message will finally help enterprises understand that the “green” benefits of technologies like virtualization and (more so) deduplication are REAL; not just by-products of smart storage decisions. Rather technologies like dedupe offer legitimate and proven green storage solutions that can be the first step in helping a company “green-up”.

In early May, I actually get to talk about this very subject with a panel of my peers. I’ll be speaking at the Red Herring North America Conference on CleanTech solutions and I’m excited to spread the word that simple storage solutions can be and are some of the best ways to green the data center. I’d really love to hear your ideas on the types of issues to bring to the table. What do you think about EPA standards? How much did green factor into your storage purchase?