Blade Watch

Techtarget

There has plenty of talk around the green data center and data center energy efficiency, and one of the players has been The Green Grid, a nonprofit group focused on the topic. The Green Grid came out with power usage effectiveness (PUE), which compares total facility power to IT equipment power.

But in the end, what matters is what your data center does, not how much energy it consumes. You might have a PUE of 1.1, but if your servers just sit there idly all day long, who cares? Data centers are built to perform work, and if they don’t do that, energy consumption doesn’t mean squat. Re-enter The Green Grid.

Over the last year or so, there has been discussion over defining data center performance compared to energy consumed, often referred to as a data center’s useful work or data center productivity. The Green Grid has now come out with eight different proposals for “proxies,” which the group describes as approximations for comparing data center production to data center energy consumption. It compares them to the stickers in car lots that claim a certain miles-per-gallon rating, right down to the warning that “your mileage may vary.”

A value or process to manage data center energy consumption and energy or data center efficiency would certainly make data center management and reporting easier. The challenge represents mainly in the conceptual stage – who determines this value and how do we apply it retrospectively? We need to shift a gear forward, skip to step 2 so to speak. Assign articles in the data center an efficiency standard, and shift the conversation away from the nuts and bolts of the topic to one that’s relevant to the end user. By this I mean, if my DL380 is running my application fine, it works, that it uses 30w more than a newer server might not actually be that big a deal, dependent on who’s paying and the cost of updating or porting the application to a newer platform.

Hopefully we’ll see greater developments in this, but I wonder if we might not do something very simple and therefore inefficient (stick with me). Let’s say I use 500kw, could I divide this by the revenue or value created to give me a per watt efficiency or put another way the amount of power needed to give me my revenue. Therefore, if I replaced the legacy x86 servers with more efficient systems or deployed more virtualization technologies, could this improve my revenue per watt?

Related posts:

1. IBM to further its Green Sigma Consulting service Reuters The first involves the creation of the Green Sigma...
2. Talking efficiency and everything else Doug emailed me about a topic he’s been talking about...
3. Four points about energy efficient blade solutions Hi Martin, Can you summarize a few points about creating...
4. Green IT discussion continues Cityspur.com “Green computing” isn’t just about saving the world for...
5. Faronics on PC Power Management Faronics SAN RAMON, CA, September 17, 2009 – Faronics, an...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.