Until somewhat recently, electricity usage wasn’t near the top of IT concerns.  In fact, the costs for running and cooling the IT infrastructure generally wasn’t even considered part of the IT budget within most organizations.  For instance, server density in data centers wasn’t significant enough to create any real power management issues, and the cost of electricity was low enough to not raise concerns across organizations. 

Today, as the amount of data circulating within the Internet and across computing devices continues to increase exponentially, businesses, government organizations and other institutions around the world are aggressively filling data center racks with powerful servers to keep pace.  At the same time, energy shortages and energy costs are now quickly rising to the top of the list of economic and environmental concerns for organizations worldwide.  Accordingly, a movement to increase data center and IT energy efficiency is gaining momentum. 

Helping focus attention on this growing challenge is The Green Grid, an industry consortium dedicated to improving energy efficiency within data centers and business computing ecosystems.  Founded in early 2007, this fast-growing organization is working to define and promote the most effective energy-efficiency practices in data center operations, construction and design in order to help solve the numerous problems related to power consumption, power conversion and energy efficiency metrics that are plaguing data centers across the globe.

The Green Grid has identified that inefficiencies within data centers are easy to find.  For example, the process of power conversion within data centers is an area in need of significant improvement.  From the time power enters into a data center until the time it reaches a server’s microprocessors, power is converted numerous times.  IT data centers typically burn more power in power conversion and cooling at light loads (zero to 25 percent platform utilization) than the computer systems themselves are using to produce real work.  This represents a sizeable opportunity for energy savings in the design of power conversion and cooling systems that scale better with the load.

Until recently, there has been a lack of a unified method for establishing and reporting server energy consumption.  Fair comparisons for data center energy efficiency (and the components that comprise it) require a standardized set of performance and energy efficiency metrics.  They should be similar to how miles-per-gallon (MPG) comparisons for vehicles allow buyers to compare how well a car converts fuel (in gallons) into work (in miles).

The Green Grid believes data center managers need a standard set of metrics to understand the efficiency of their data centers, improve the performance-per-watt of their IT equipment, and make smarter, energy-efficient IT purchases.  For example, the Green Grid supports metrics such as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and its reciprocal, Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE), which are starting to receive broad support within the industry.

For more information, visit: http://www.thegreengrid.org. 

Comments:

Add Your Comment

Name: Company name:

Email:

(We will never sell your name or e-mail address to anyone)

Comment:

Remember my personal information
Notify me of follow-up comments?

Please enter the word you see in the image below: