Wednesday, May 18, 2011

The Green Grid Completes Energy Efficiency Recommendations

Portland, OR –  The Green Grid Association together with The Data Center Metrics Coordination Taskforce, delivered its latest recommendations for energy efficiency measurement and reporting earlier this week.

The new report, titled “Recommendations for Measuring and Reporting Overall Data Center Efficiency: Version 2 – Measuring PUE at Data Centers” completes the guidelines for applying the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE™) metric, created and promoted by The Green Grid. The new information includes specific recommendations for how to measure and calculate PUE in mixed-use data center facilities and introduces a condenser water source energy weighting factor.

Alignment on these methodologies across the industry will lead to consistent and repeatable measurement strategies that allow data center operators to monitor and improve the energy efficiency when operating their existing data centers, or when designing new facilities.

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 mixed-use data centers, 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.

“The task force has accomplished a tremendous amount of work to help the data center industry have a common understanding of energy efficiency metrics to improve data center efficiencies and reduce energy use,” said Dan Azevedo, Symantec representative and Board member of The Green Grid. “We are looking forward to working with our colleagues on the next steps for the industry, including identifying a roadmap for future efficiency programs such as IT productivity and carbon accounting.”

The task force intends to continue collaborating in the years ahead to ensure that data center resource efficiency and productivity is delivered as consistently as possible across regions. The Green Grid, which encourages worldwide industry collaboration, is actively working on dozens of strategic and tactical projects to improve data center resource efficiency.

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