With the aim to facilitate buyers’ identification of energy-efficient systems, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) introduced its Energy Star for Enterprise Servers certification on Friday.

The new EPA program, with its final specification published on the agency Web site on Friday, is EPA’s most recent addition to its overall objective of bettering data center energy efficiency. According to Andrew Fanara, head of the Energy Star product programs, the list of the initial qualifying servers would likely be available on the agency’s site by this weekend.

Fanara said that the final program will cover servers with up to four processor sockets and one hard drive. Though blade servers are not included as yet in the first version launched, they might be added to the program in the coming couple of months.

For awarding the Energy Star certification implying extremely energy-efficient devices, the program will gauge a device’s performance in three main categories, namely – management of power supply performance; functioning in a virtualized environment; and energy yardsticks for measuring and reporting server energy use.

Talking about the difficulty in measuring energy performance of different types of servers, and ensuring the certification’s real-world applicability, Fanara said: “Sometimes it takes a while to define what real savings means. This is a starting point for learning about the true energy consumption of these products.”