Metrics & Measurements

Please note: PUE: A Comprehensive Examination of the Metric supersedes all prior white papers and consolidates all of the new and previously published content that The Green Grid has developed related to PUE.

Trends in data centers toward increased virtualization, power management of information technology equipment (such as servers, network, and storage)—along with continuous growth in storage, network, and compute capacities—mean that power loads for IT devices in data centers may be very dynamic during the life of a data center. The Green Grid Association’s metrics for Data Center infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE) and Power Utilization Effectiveness (PUE) are highly useful data center metrics for measuring long-term energy efficiency. However, to better assess how well a facility’s infrastructure handles the dynamic changes in IT power loads, a data center needs to understand how well its total energy consumption scales with changes in IT power load. This paper explains how to leverage energy consumption data collection to enhance the results of PUE/DCiE metrics with additional statistical analyses and a new metric called PUE Scalability to provide a well-rounded view of data center infrastructure energy efficiency. A spreadsheet was used to plug-in power data samples and yield statistics for the PUE Scalability Metric. The pre-loaded data included in this spreadsheet can be replaced by user data. This spreadsheet is located under content type - tools.