Blade Watch

http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2008/ndc1/021808-ndc-power-metrics.html?ts0hb=&story=ac1_ndc1

Two metrics are emerging as industry standards for measuring data center power consumption: Power Usage Effectiveness and Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency.

Both metrics are backed by The Green Grid, an industry consortium formed last year to develop standards for measuring data center efficiency and productivity (see “Where to turn for advice about power”). These metrics are used to compare the amount of electricity the data center consumes for power and cooling with the amount of power used by the data center’s IT equipment.

“Site infrastructure overhead is a simple concept,” says Ken Brill, founder and executive director of the Uptime Institute, which provides consulting services to more than 100 data center operators. “It’s easy to measure and captures everything.”

Here’s how The Green Grid defines these two metrics for measuring data center infrastructure overhead:

1. PUE = Total facility power IT equipment power PUE is a ratio. Should be less than 2; the closer to 1, the better.

2. DCiE = IT equipment power x 100 Total facility power DCiE is a percentage. The bigger the number, the better.

“The word about these metrics is really getting out into the community,” says John Pflueger, technology strategist at Dell and a member of The Green Grid’s Technical Committee. “These metrics have been discussed in some of our meetings in Europe. Policymakers at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy are very aware of these metrics.”

A lot of work remains, however, to document ways to collect power-consumption data and to apply these metrics so they can be used to compare the efficiency of data centers in different organizations, Pflueger says.

Do check out this great article about energy efficiency in the data center, it’s a topic of discussion that is set to continue. I was talking to a colleague in data center planning at one of the banks in Canary Wharf the other day. I was asking him about the concept of rating the data center, if we could have some time the kind of rating you get when you buy a washing machine. I was also interest to see how involved he was in the energy aspects of the data center. I’ve got an interview which is being posted tomorrow, interestingly to him the energy argument was one more of capacity of how many DL380’s you can get in the data centers with that number of Sun V490s and IBM blades you can have in the room at one time. Efficiency is part of it but not as much as delivering space and power to the business.

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