Design Article

Get a grip on your data center power efficiency

The Green Grid

6/7/2007 3:32 PM EDT

The Green Grid believes that several metrics can help IT organizations better understand and improve the energy efficiency of their existing datacenters, as well as help them make smarter decisions on new datacenter deployments. In addition, these metrics provide a dependable way to measure their results against comparable IT organizations. Why the need for greater energy efficiency? Because datacenter power and cooling are two of the biggest issues facing IT organizations today, and growing companies need a way to control these costs while enabling future expansion. With more efficient datacenters, IT organizations can better manage increased computing, network, and storage demands, lower energy costs, and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO)—all while remaining competitive and able to meet future business needs.[1]

The Green Grid recognizes the importance of establishing metrics for datacenter efficiency, and offers guidance on technologies that claim to improve performance-per-watt. Ideally, these metrics and processes will help determine if the existing datacenter can be optimized before a new datacenter is needed.

The Green Grid supports two related metrics that have been recently introduced to the industry. These new metrics are Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)[2] and Datacenter Efficiency (DCE)2,3.

Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Datacenter Efficiency (DCE)
The PUE is defined as follows:

Power Usage Effectiveness Equation

For equations 2 and 3, the Total Facility Power is defined as the power measured at the utility meter—the power dedicated solely to the datacenter (this is important in mixed-use buildings that house datacenters as one of a number of functions).


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