Technology & Strategy

Power & Cooling, and by association energy efficiency, are widely accepted as the top concerns of many data center owners/operators today. As a result, there is an industry-wide push to improve data center energy efficiency. In turn, there is increasing adoption of The Green Grid’s PUE metric as a proxy for data center energy efficiency. In order to be able to calculate and optimize the PUE, the data center owner/operator needs to know what, where, and how to measure the necessary energy consumption data. In a collaborative effort between ASHRAE TC9.9 and The Green Grid (TGG), the topic of real-time energy consumption measurements in data centers has been tackled and documented in a book entitled “Real-Time Energy Consumption Measurements in Data Centers”. The presentation will be based upon the book and will provide an overview of what, where, and how to measure the energy consumption for the power and cooling infrastructure. In addition, an overview of software and sensor systems that can be used for these measurements is provided. Finally, the topics of calculating the PUE for data centers housed in mixed-use facilities, and data centers that deploy Combined Cooling, Heat, and Power (CCHP) systems, are addressed.