The European Commission has honored 27 IBM data centers for their energy efficiency under the European Union's Code of Conduct for the facilities.

News of the award from the EU's executive body came this week. The sites constitute 70 percent of IBM's portfolio of outsourced data centers in Europe. It was the first time that so many properties of a single company had been recognized for meeting the Code of Conduct for Data Centers.

The standards include best practices for efficient use of energy, and for the deployment of hardware and energy management strategies that support efficient consumption.

Strong consideration also is given to the power usage effectiveness of facilities -- a measure of how efficiently a data center uses power. Last May, the Uptime Institute said IBM data centers have an average rating of 1.65 for power usage compared to the industry average of 1.8.

Data centers are the backbone of IBM's business and the company has a strong tradition of modeling aggressive energy management and innovations in the facilities, as well as developing solutions for its own operations and the market.

Use of the company's Mobile Management Technology is key to its efficiency campaign in data centers. The technology enables the data collection and analysis of temperature, air flow and other indicators, which in turn enable the cooling system to work smarter.

With such energy management measures in place in its European data centers, IBM said it was able to double its IT capacity in the area in three years without increasing power consumption.

Photo of data center via Shutterstock.com.