by Brianna Crandall — February 28, 2014—Power usage effectiveness (PUE) has become the industry-preferred and globally adopted metric for facilities professionals and engineers to measure the energy efficiency of data centers. In response to this demand, global building technology society ASHRAE (formerly the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) and nonprofit consortium The Green Grid have published PUE: A Comprehensive Examination of the Metric.
This is the 11th book in the Datacom series of publications from ASHRAE Technical Committee (TC) 9.9, Mission Critical Facilities, Data Centers, Technology Spaces and Electronic Equipment.
“Our primary goal is to provide the data center industry with unbiased, vendor-neutral data in an understandable and actionable way, and this latest publication on the PUE metric does exactly that,” said Don Beaty, publication subcommittee chair of TC 9.9. “We want to ensure that data center designers, owners and operators have access to information that enables them to make informed and educated decisions based on their business needs and value systems.”
For this book, all previously published material related to PUE was consolidated and augmented with new material. The content includes detailed information on procedures for calculating, reporting and analyzing PUE measurements, plus quick references to other resources in print and online. The intention is that a broad audience—from those implementing and reporting data center metrics seeking in-depth application knowledge and resources to executives hoping to gain a higher level of understanding of the concepts surrounding PUE—can easily grasp the guidance offered.
“Data centers are complex systems for which power and cooling remain key issues facing IT organizations today,” John Tuccillo, chairman of the board for The Green Grid Association, said. “The Green Grid Association’s PUE metric has been instrumental in helping data center owners and operators better understand and improve the energy efficiency of their existing data centers, as well as helping them make better decisions on new data center deployments.”
Power usage effectiveness (PUE) was first defined by The Green Grid, a nonprofit, open industry consortium of end users, policy makers, technology providers, facilities architects and utility companies working to improve the resource efficiency of information technology (IT) and data centers throughout the world.
PUE: A Comprehensive Examination of the Metric, $50 for ASHRAE members and $59 for nonmembers, is available from the ASHRAE Web site.
