The Green Grid has thrown its support behind the new European Commission's Code of Conduct on Data Center Energy Efficiency. While critics regularly assail the EC's voluntary Codes of Conduct as toothless, the latest code offers much-needed guidance for data center operators.This isn't the first time the two groups have worked together. The EC's Joint Research Center is using the Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE) metric, defined by The Green Grid, as the metric for which data centers in the EU will be measured for efficiency. The DCiE metric helps data center operators clearly determine how much energy is consumed by IT equipment and how much is consumed by the facility itself. Until now, EC Codes of Conduct have been launched for external power supplies, digital TV services, broadband equipment, and UPS systems.

A companion best practices guide offers a mix of common-sense practices and hard-to-implement energy savings tips. Among the former: the suggestion that businesses "carry out an audit of existing equipment to maximise any unused existing capability by ensuring that all areas of optimisation, consolidation and aggregation are identified prior to new material investment."

Among the latter: the suggestion that businesses "determine the business impact of service incidents for each IT service and deploy only the level of Business Continuity/ Disaster Recovery standby IT equipment and resilience that is actually justified by the business impact." This suggestion, the EC notes, should only take place when new IT equipment is planned.

It sounds obvious, of course. Buy and use only what you would reasonably need. The tricky part is in getting business and IT to agree on what constitutes business impact, particularly at a time when regulatory compliance and terrorism are making more headlines.

But that, I suppose, is why they call them "best practices."