Canadian Government to buy only Energy Star qualified servers

The Canadian Government announced this week that it is planning on only buying Energy Star qualified servers. Canada, along with many other Governments including the EU, Switzerland, Australia and Japan have adopted the US EPA’s energy efficiency certifications for appliances.

The datacentre and hosting industries have seen a huge green push over the last several years and it is interesting to see a client with the purchasing power of the Canadian Government make an announcement like this.

With space being such an issue in data centers, it is easy to sacrifice energy efficiency with space efficiency. Although much attention has been put on making data center infrastructure and design more energy efficient, it’s nice to see a push to get the servers in those data centers more efficient as well.

Lydia Aouani of Natural Resources Canada said “Soon, any server purchased by our government will be Energy Star (certified).” She also noted that “If all data centers were using state of the art energy efficiency technologies, by 2011 we would go back to our electricity consumption levels of the year 2000,”