Data Centers Want an MPG Rating for Energy Efficiency
These days, with the shock of US$150-per-barrel oil only a year old, consumers in the market for a car will likely pay much more attention to a pair of numbers: The vehicle's two miles-per-gallon ratings.
Companies in the market for efficient data center equipment, however, find themselves cursed with a scarcity of such data. While some basic efficiency measures exist for designers of data centers, as of yet, there is no standard method or metric for comparing energy efficiency of the computing hardware that fills the complexes.
"That has always been the challenge of the data center-you cannot compare one data center to another, because they do different work," says Michelle Bailey, vice president of market researcher IDC's Enterprise Platforms and Datacenter Trends group.
Do The Math on Cloud Computing Power Savings
What kind of power efficiencies can cloud computing providers achieve compared to today's enterprise data centers? See CIO.com blogger and cloud expert Bernard Golden's recent analysis of a real-life example in "Power: One Cloud Cost Advantage That May Be Irresistible."
However, the industry is actively searching for an answer. Their first attempt compares the power used by the data center overall to the power consumed solely by information-technology equipment. Known as the power usage effectiveness (PUE), the metric gives data-center architects a data point with which to holistically compare the overall efficiency in delivering power to computers and routers in the building. In the past, data centers typically use a third to a half of all energy for cooling and other non-computer functions, giving them a PUE of 1.5 to 2.0.
Such efficiency matters. In 2005, the total power consumed by servers accounted for 0.6 percent of all electricity consumed in the United States, according to research done by AMD. Add to that the cost of cooling those servers and the requirements doubled, to 1.2 percent of U.S. annual power consumption. (See CIO.com's Five Energy Trends Driving Your Data Center for more background on this topic.)
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Productivity Ratings
We at Emerson Network Power delighted to see a greater focus on server efficiency. Maximizing data center efficiency can only be achieved by optimizing the productivity of the IT assets. To that end we support the recent efforts by the Green Grid to establish a set of proxies for useful work within a server. This needs to be the core focus of the server community as power supplies today are nearing 94% efficiency – a point of diminishing returns. We encourage readers to become familiar with the Green Grid proxies, download the white paper, Proxy Proposals for Measuring Data Center Efficiency, and provide feedback and recommendations to the Green Grid via the on-line survey tool. They should also review the related CUPS proxy white paper that provides useful tools to immediately improve data center efficiency.Finally, at the individual device level we are encouraged with the industry’s collaboration with the US EPA to drive a unified standard that creates an ENERGY STAR ® rating for servers. With the ENERGY STAR power profile IT professionals will be able to better understand their expected performance at the device level. The data center building’s performance is a given often well outside their control.
Regards
Jack Pouchet
Director Energy Initiatives
Emerson Network Power
http://www.efficientdatacenter.com
http://www.emerson.com/edc/docs/EnergyLogicMetricPaper.pdf
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