Green Grid Publishes Data Center Efficiency Metrics

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.

Green Grid Publishes Data Center Efficiency Metrics