Thread: US, Europe, Japan concur on Data Center Efficiency Metric

Business groups and government agencies from U.S., Europe and Japan reached basic agreement on how to compute energy effectiveness of data centers. Agreement seen as important as it launches common metric that various types of data centers, in world, can utilize to report their level of energy efficiency. That could give yardstick for companies to assess efficiency of their own data centers, and also to gauge usefulness of energy-saving methods employed by other facilities.

Agreement is strange for its level of global cooperation. Orchestrated by Green Grid, an industry group in U.S., agreement is backed by U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Environmental safety Agency, European Union Code of Conduct and Japan Ministry of Economy, as said by statement from Green Grid. Participants agreed to adopt Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE, as their "preferred energy efficiency metric," statement says. PUE, made by Green Grid, divides total energy used by data center by amount of energy utilized to power IT tools. Result displays how energy is missing to mechanical and electrical systems.

Agreement follows many meetings of stakeholders and interested parties. Representatives from EPA met with much data center industry groups from U.S., containing 7x24 Exchange and ASHRAE. EPA then took input from those groups to meeting of global representatives. "These guiding principles meant to help drive common knowing of energy efficiency in data centers," EPA's Energy Star for Data Centers program said in note to its member companies.

Green Grid is understood to be in talks with representatives from China, India and other big markets to carry them on board with program also. Agreement comes as energy utilize in data centers comes in increasing study. Rising energy prices and amount of IT tools that has been included to data centers in some years has created them cost center on radar of senior executives.

In U.S., Securities and Exchange Commission available new guidelines previous month about risks linked to climate change that public companies should disclose to investors. Overall, ruling gives businesses containing those in IT and data center industries yet other reason to maintain energy utilize and environmental performance on radar at highest levels of management.

Hello
What are temperature and humidity values that will be acceptable in a multi-vendor installation and where are they measured? The Ashrae Book, Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing Environments, provides environmental classes and environmental specifications. The IT manufacturers were well represented on the Ashrae Committee TC 9.9 resulting in the environmental classes and specifications being universally accepted by the industry.
It has been common practice to operate data centers at fairly low temperatures such as 68 degrees Fahrenheit and at fairly high humidities such as 50% relative humidity. Some of the habit to operate at these conditions may be a carryover from the original mainframe days and may be compounded by conservatism.
IT equipment including servers and network equipment have many applications including ones that are external to the data center and therefore different operating conditions such as unoccupied, lights off, or unconditioned. The Ashra...