by Brianna Crandall — December 10, 2010—The Green Grid, the global consortium advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems, announced December 2 the creation of two new metrics designed to help improve the sustainability of data center facilities by measuring the effectiveness of carbon and water use tied specifically to the IT energy infrastructure they contain.
The new metrics, called Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) and the upcoming Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), are joining The Green Grid’s widely used Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric. All are designed to help IT, facilities, and sustainability organizations across the globe optimize their data centers.
PUE helps managers determine the efficiency of the IT gear in their data centers by comparing the total amount of energy consumed by the data center facility to the total amount of energy consumed by the IT equipment inside it. PUE was recently established by a cross-industry data center metric task force as the recommended metric for determining energy efficiency in dedicated data center facilities.
CUE will help managers determine the amount of greenhouse gas emissions generated in delivering work from the IT gear in a data center facility. Similarly, WUE will help managers determine the amount of water used by the facility, and the amount used to deliver work from IT operations.
A white paper outlining the new CUE metric, including methods for calculating it, can be found on The Green Grid Web site. Materials related to WUE will be made available in the first quarter of 2011.
