Welcome to the Friday Roundup, where we gather up the interesting links we've found over the course of the week. I hope you enjoy them as much as we have.
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Long Live Performance per Watt!
Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) has been called The Holy Grail of Data Center Energy Metrics so often that we actually found it impossible to find out who coined the term. As time, technology, and sustainability efforts evolve, the PUE metric is no longer the stopping point for energy efficiency measurement but has become just one more piece in the larger picture.
What does PUE do? It measures how much of the energy entering a data center facility is used to power the computing devices within, versus the amount used for cooling and overhead of the facility. That’s it.
In an ideal world the PUE is 1.0, which means that 100% of the energy is used by the computing devices in the data center. Since 1.0 is an impossible to achieve ideal, the standard goal for most data centers is a PUE of less than 2.0, which means that for every 1 Watt of energy used by the computing devices, an additional 1 Watt is used for facilities overhead such as air conditioning and lighting.
At first glance, this is a very direct metric. It’s easy to understand and easy to follow. The problem with relying solely on PUE is that it in no way measures the efficiency of the IT devices themselves.
Data center managers today are under pressure to deliver increasingly higher energy efficiency and lower costs. In order to understand the true efficiency levels and progress toward enterprise sustainability goals, managers MUST have access to an accurate performance measurement of each device in the facility.
The measurement recommended by JouleX is Performance per Watt (PPW). What’s the difference? The PPW metric measures the actual energy efficiency of every device in the data center and PUE measures the efficiency of the data center facility.
What can the PPW measurement tell you?
- Are the servers using twice the electricity needed for the jobs they’re doing?
- Are you wasting electricity powering dead servers?
- Are the old switches and routers costing you more in power than it would cost you to replace them?
- Would virtualization of newer, more energy efficient servers, allow you to retire old servers completely?
Being able to measure Performance per Watt will help data center managers identify devices that are wasting energy, and as we’ve always said “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”.
Thank you for taking the time to visit the JouleX IT Blog. We hope you'll join us on Facebook or Twitter and subscribe to our RSS Feed! We look forward to joining you in the Green IT conversation!