Emerson Calls For Industrywide Metric For Measuring Data Center Efficiency
Similar to MPG for Vehicles, Universal Measurement Needed to Help Data Centers
Calculate, Prioritize IT Energy Efficiency Actions
COLUMBUS, OH (November 18, 2008) – With data centers using an increasing amount of energy, the need for strategies to improve efficiency has caught the attention of corporations worldwide. However, the lack of an industry-wide measurement of data center efficiency is hindering efforts to calculate and prioritize actions that can reduce energy use.
Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson (NYSE: EMR) and the global leader in enabling Business-Critical Continuityâ„¢, thinks that must change and is today calling on the information technology industry to agree on a data center efficiency metric that plays the same role as the miles-per-gallon (MPG) metric for vehicle fuel efficiency. Emerson Network Power believes the industry metric should take into account not only energy used by data centers but also the amount of information processed by them.
This is something that is great interest to me for a number of reasons. We’ll have to see what the response is, and certainly the more we talk about it, the more we contribute to the concept and evolve it, the more we can get it right for the industry and the end users alike. You can check out their site here.
Firstly if I could have a benchmark value of efficiency for my server, it might help me think about how I am investing in my data center, in my IT, think about how we are spending the money, if little steps (possibly in areas I hadn’t thought about) could be done more efficiently.
Secondly it allows managers and business sponsors to have a value placed upon their data center, a rating which we can then use to establish how we transform our business through data center transformation and investment. How we can invest to move from today (our data center at 90% capacity, to our next generation IT in a next generation data center, delivering real value and empowerment in line with the business strategy.
To illustrate that this is where we are, our data center has a rating of say 1000. By decommissioning the legacy x86′s using a combination of virtualization and more energy efficiency servers it might increase to say 1350, (a large increase for possibly a low investment in real terms). All those times where you’ve been trying to explain to a customer that by simply switching from their 9 year old x86s to the newer lower voltage/more efficient servers they might reduce their support and energy costs. It might also though lead end users and vendors to consider things that they hadn’t thought about in terms of the data center, the facilities, the UPS/Air conditioning and air flow, even the cabinets or type of power used.
With a value we can illustrate the benefits of investment, we can establish:
- What we can do to reduce our data center energy issues short term
- What we can do long term to improve the efficiency of the data center
- Whether we should be looking at infrastructure (IT) or facilities, or both and which might give us the most effective pay back?
Being able to relate investment to business return on investment is increasingly important as the end users, the business sponsors start to ask, why, justify the investement. Granted any value could be debated, but it is a value, something with which we can use to illustrate the return on investment, to the zen idea where I can say, the cost per transaction for front office is… where I can say, for every $1 you spend on IT (refreshing hardware, deploying application and infrastructure virtualization), you get $0.25 (even more) return on investment in cost reduction, business empowerment or reliability/scalability. Where I can say the total costs of the data center are $x million, the amount of revenue derived from this are $x, so our data center contributes so much in revenue and value to our business.
As we move to declaring our data center carbon footprint, to discussing how we offset the ‘cost’ of running the data center, might we declare some sort of data center value of efficiency, amount of power used for revenue/business benefit, might it enable us to ask the shareholders, can we invest this to reduce our data center costs, to align with our corporate social responsbility strategy?
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This is certainly a laudable goal. Calculating MPG is very straightforward, dividing two easily quantifiable values together. Defining the analogous variables for the data center is difficult. You would have to agree on the level of the measure; the entire IT environment at a company, a single data center, a single server, a set of servers supporting a specific application?
One variable would be kWH, replacing Gallons in the MPG calculation. Defining the equivalent for miles is vastly more complex. The challenge lies in the definition of a unit of work: What do you measure per kW? Is it a transaction, compute cycle, or availability? How do you compare a virtualized environment to one that is not virtualized? The configuration permutations are infinite. And this is only about the servers. Add in the complexity of the infrastructure systems, all of them, and I struggle to imagine how two data centers can be effectively compared.
Using the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) ratio from The Green Grid does establish one benchmark, but it does not evaluate the efficiency of the IT equipment load. Improving the efficiency of the IT equipment can actually increase PUE.
There is the potential for a relatively simple measure though; Revenue/IT spend. This would require establishing standardized reporting to ensure all companies included the same expenses in the IT spend and businesses would have to be willing to publish this data so that comparisons could be made. Any CFOs out there care to weigh in?