New Data Center Efficiency Standard Proposed
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Mon, Jul 26, 2010 @ 08:56 AM
As any data center manager or CIO can tell you, data center power costs have become a huge concern. Being able to measure the efficiency of power usage at the data center and being able to make improvements can reduce energy costs and also create an environment in which data center equipment operates at a higher level of efficiency. The good news for data center managements is that there’s a new way to measure power on the way.
A number of organizations, spearheaded by The Green Grid, has created a method for data centers to be able to measure the efficiency of their power expenditures. The standard, known as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), is designed to help bring some consistency to the way that data centers measure power usage, and to make it so that different data centers can compare their numbers.
The standard creates the PUE measurement by comparing the actual energy used by a data center to the amount of energy that actually makes it to the IT equipment. This demonstrates how much power is consumed by ancillary systems, such as cooling systems.
There’s been talk of using PUE in the data center for some time, but up until now there hasn’t been a way to compare it in a standard way. This method for calculating PUE was developed by The Green Grid along with the U.S. Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star Program, the Uptime Institute, the U.S. Building Council and more.
For now, the group has only released recommendations for dedicated data centers. The plan is to provide another set of recommendations for use in data centers that are not part of a dedicated facility, but rather are one part of a mixed-use facility.
This new standard will help to create a common understanding in the industry that should foster dialogue and will, in the long run, create more efficient data centers. It utilizes four different ways of tracking PUE so as to include as many types of data centers as possible. The lowest level of measurement uses the utility meter to take snapshots over 12 12 months, while the most accurate type of PUE measurement will measure at the point where devices connect to the electrical distribution system.
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