Dell says it has hooked up with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to stick little gold star's denoting energy efficiency on all its servers.

The EPA, which we erroneously believed consisted solely of Al Gore wearing a cape, must be very proud of Dell, seeing as the computer maker is apparently the first major vendor to certify entire platforms to meet its performance per watt requirements. Not only that, but Dell is also boasting its PowerEdge R610 and R710 server platforms have qualified for the new Energy Star specification too.

"The focus on energy efficiency isn't just about being tree-hugger-green, but more about saving green - as in dollars," says Dell's Matt McGinnis on the company blog. McGinnis explains that with limited space, the need for power and cooling, as well as rising energy costs, data centre management can be all pain little gain.

In this economic climate of doom, IT departments are being told to up the ante on compute capacity without expanding their server footprints, and are also being told to find effective ways to then cool these power guzzling beasts.

It's not the first time Dell has decided to go green either. Back in 2007 the firm introduced something called "Energy Smart" which purportedly helped punters squeeze the most performance out of every watt for the particular workload they were running, and helped stick to a budget too.

The new green regime apparently means Dell's hardware has been hooked up with kit that can give accurate performance measurements in real time, whilst also delivering stats on power consumption and thermals. These measurements are apparently pushed into Energy Smart's control algorithms causing the system to auto-optimize.