SAN JOSE,
Calif.—Two-thirds of enterprises that
deploy data centers currently have no corporate incentives in place for
increasing energy efficiency in those IT systems, industry research made public
Feb. 4 by The Green Grid reported.
This equates with the fact that most companies are not currently offering
incentives to their employees to help increase energy efficiency, even though
doing so could mean substantial bottom-line and environmental results, the
report said.
"Incentives do not have to be monetary to be effective; employees often
value verbal acknowledgement," the Green Grid's Data Collections and
Analysis workgroup wrote in the report. "A company's initiative to boost
energy efficiency may meet with greater success if it includes some form of
employee incentives."
Incentives also can come from external sources. Pacific Gas & Electric in Northern
California, for one, offers cash rebates to companies that
demonstrate energy savings.
For example, network storage provider NetApp, whose headquarters is located in
PG&E's service area, received
a $1.4 million rebate in December 2008 from the utility, largely as the
result of a new green corporate data center on its Sunnyvale, Calif., campus.
The Green Grid, which concluded its third annual Technical Forum Feb. 4,
discussed the results of its Data Center Energy Measurement Survey analysis
during the event. The survey of 151 data center managers was completed
last November but had to undergo vetting by the Environmental Protection Agency
before being publicized.
The survey of data center managers and IT decision-makers also confirmed that
despite the best efforts of the Green Grid, Save Energy Now and the EPA's
Energy Star Program, the industry does not yet have a consistent process for
measuring energy usage.
Only Half of Enterprises Measuring Power Efficiency
Only a little more than half of the respondents (54 percent) said they actually
measure the energy effectiveness of their data centers using two relatively new
formulas: PUE (power usage effectiveness) and DCiE (data center infrastructure
efficiency).
PUE is a metric created in 2009 by the Green Grid that determines the amount of
energy used by a facility and all the IT gear inside of it. A PUE score 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.
DCiE is expressed as a percentage: i.e., 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.
Of the survey respondents, approximately one-third use dedicated power meters
on servers, storage equipment and network equipment; another one-third rely on
nameplate values; and one-third do not measure energy usage at all.
Lead contributors to the report were Ron Bednar and Jessica Winiecki of Emerson
Network Power and Kathrin Winkler of EMC.
The Green Grid also introduced two
new online tools for measuring PUE and DCiE that will become available next
month.
Earlier on Feb. 4, environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explained
in a Technical Forum keynote address that he believes the IT sector should
be the prime mover in the establishment of a new power grid able to transport
renewable power resources over long distances.
Organizations like the Green Grid can play important roles in the design and
construction of a modern power grid, which would bring huge economic and
environmental benefits to the world community, Kennedy said.
The Green Grid is a 3-year-old nonprofit trade organization of IT professionals
formed to address the issues of power and cooling in data centers. The
organization, made up of mostly of IT vendors but that also includes
educational and nonprofit organizations, seeks to define best practices for
optimizing efficient energy usage in both power and cooling at the IT equipment
and facility levels.
For more information or to download a copy of the report, go here.
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