by jbs022210 a3 — February 26, 2010—The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has joined with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and industry leaders to announce what they call a breakthrough agreement on energy efficiency measurements, metrics, and reporting conventions for data center facilities, filling the need for a standard approach to these measurements.
The new agreement provides guiding principles for data center operators to gauge energy use and create opportunities for improved energy performance. By providing clear direction for data center energy management, the groups participating in the agreement hope to spur data center operators to improve their measurement practices, leading to higher efficiency and reduced energy consumption.
The guiding principles include:
- Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) using source energy consumption is the preferred energy efficiency metric for data centers. PUE is a measurement of the total energy of the data center divided by the IT (information technology) energy consumption.
- When calculating PUE, IT energy consumption should, at a minimum, be measured at the output of the uninterruptible power supply (UPS). However, the industry should progressively improve measurement capabilities over time so that measurement of IT energy consumption directly at the IT load (i.e. servers) becomes the common practice.
- For a dedicated data center, the total energy in the PUE equation will include all energy sources at the point of utility handoff to the data center owner or operator. For a data center in a mixed-use building, the total energy will be all energy required to operate the data center, similar to a dedicated data center, and should include cooling, lighting and support infrastructure for the data center operations.
For more information visit DOE’s Saving Energy in Data Centers Web site.
