How To Benchmark Data Center Energy Costs

January 13, 2009

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There are two ways to benchmark data center energy costs, writes Techmanic.com. The first, Corporate Average Datacenter Efficiency (CADE), was developed by the Uptime Institute and measures energy efficiency. The institute determines the facility efficiency by calculating the amount of space used and multiplying that by the energy efficiency of the building. The higher the CADE number, the more efficient the data center.

The other method is called Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), developed by the Green Grid. The PUE is calculated by dividing the total utility load by the total IT equipment load. In this method, the lower the PUE the better.

Although both methods can be effective, the measurements needed to calculate the benchmarks can be difficult to obtain, warned Forrester analyst Doug Washburn. Larger businesses usually benefit from benchmarking because the bigger the data center the more energy is consumed and the more likely the company will have an incentive to reduce consumption, he said.

Christian Belady, principle potential and cooling architect for Microsoft Global Foundation Services
and Microsoft’s representative to the Green Grid, notes that there are limits to these metrics, especially for smaller businesses, but that even small organizations can benefit by benchmarking on a smaller scale.

Last year, Uptime Institute’s Executive Director Kenneth Brill wrote in Forbes that low Power Utilization Effectiveness numbers are “scientifically meaningless.”

Brill offers five tips on how to cut energy bills while increasing cooling reliability and stability.

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Partnering with Computer Data Centers
The Department of Energy’s Industrial Technologies Program (ITP), through “Save Energy Now” public outreach, is working with U.S. computer data centers to reduce their energy consumption. Here you’ll find information about tools, partnerships, and planned activities. Principle tool is a free download, DCPRO.

The Data Center Energy Profiler, or DC Pro, is an online software tool designed to help industries worldwide quickly “diagnose” how energy is being used by their data centers and how they might save energy and money. The beta version of DC Pro was tested by 610 users, and comments received from many of those users have been incorporated into Version 1.0 of the tool, now available for download. New features include:

Online tutorial
Enhanced user interface
Answers to frequently asked questions through “Tool-Tips”
Ability to create a PDF Report of the results
Customize the source energy factor for each energy stream to account for electricity produced from cogeneration, renewable sources, etc.
Easier formats to enter Data Center input energy streams

See: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/industry/saveenergynow/partnering_data_centers.html

John Kimball | January 14th, 2009