There is now a common international officially-recognized metric for data center energy efficiency. Power Usage Effectiveness, the metric developed by The Green Grid, a data center industry group, will be officially used by government agencies in the US, Europe and Japan.
These meetings led to the common adoption of PUE by the three governments. “It makes PUE pretty much the undisputed champion of data center energy efficiency metrics worldwide,” member of TGG board of directors Jon Haas said. Haas is also director of Intel’s Eco-Technology Program Office.
PUE is used to measure what portion of total power consumed by a data center is consumed by IT equipment.
Haas explained that international harmonization of ways to measure data center energy efficiency will allow countries to compare “apples to apples,” as they begin to benchmark their energy efficiency against each other. “We are able to compare and benchmark and better align ourselves, from a global coordinated standpoint, around energy-efficient IT.”
The organization’s major next step is development of a finer metric that measures productivity of IT as related to the amount of energy consumed. Part of that effort is finding a common language for software vendors to communicate productivity of the programs they produce, associate that productivity with resources the programs use and encourage vendors to use that common language.
The long-term goal is to develop a productivity metric that acts in a similar way as miles-per-gallon. It will, for example, allow a user to tell how much energy it takes to send an email, Haas explained.
TGG has also established a new office that will provide technical advice to administrators of EPA’s Energy Star program. EPA issues an Energy Star rating to appliances and buildings that rank highest in energy efficiency among their peers. The agency already has an established Energy Star rating for servers. A rating for data centers is expected this June. Also in the works is an Energy Star rating for storage equipment and UPS systems.
TGG’s new Energy Star Program Management Office will be headed by members of the organization’s board of directors.
