SAN JOSE,
Calif.—The
Green Grid, a mere toddler at age 2, is beginning to put its permanent
imprint on the IT industry.
No other corporate or industry group has yet been able to define scientifically—to
the satisfaction of a majority of IT professionals—how to measure the
performance of a data center in power usage and cooling efficiency, and also
how it treats the environment with its carbon footprint.
The consortium of data center-related technology companies took a major step in
that direction Feb. 4 by publishing its first data center energy-efficiency
reporting guidelines at its second technical conference here at the San Jose
Marriott.
Quantifying the power efficiencies of a data center may appear to be something
pretty esoteric, but rest assured, it is all very scientific.
There are two metrics, which are now beginning the lengthy process of becoming
international industry standards:
- Power usage effectiveness (PUE): This is a ratio of total facility
power divided by IT equipment power. Ideally it should be less than 2-to-1; the
closer to 1-to-1, the better.
- Data center infrastructure efficiency (DCiE): DCiE is a
percentage: IT equipment power x 100, divided by total facility power. The
bigger the number, the better. A data center's DCiE should never be more than
1.
The Green Grid, which consists of 211 member companies and features board
members from Microsoft, Intel, EMC,
Hewlett-Packard, Dell and four other top-tier corporations, also launched a new
educational offering for members called New Data Center 2.0.
This is a program designed to provide the IT industry with a multiyear set of
design guidelines for data center operators and designers, so they can build
and/or run more energy-efficient data centers.
"We're basically saying, 'Here's the playbook, now go build off of it.
Start today by changing your mental processes and start thinking differently,'"
Dan Azevedo of Symantec, chair of the Green Grid's metrics committee, told
about 300 attendees at the conference.
In addition, The Green Grid released a list of new white papers,
which can be downloaded free of charge.
Topics include "PUE Scalability," "Proxies for Estimating Data
Center Productivity" and "Using Virtualization to Improve Data Center
Efficiency."
eWEEK has written quite often about the latter topic. Go here for links.
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