Nov 18, 2008 : Emerson Offers Efficiency Metric

📅 November 18, 2008 - Emerson Network Power (emerson.com), a business-critical continuity business, issued a new white paper on Tuesday that discusses how an industry-wide measure of data center efficiency is a crucial next step in addressing IT energy consumption.


The white paper, "Energy Logic: Calculating and Prioritizing Your Data Center IT Efficiency Actions," uses a placeholder metric to highlight the value of measuring data center efficiency, comparable to the miles-per-gallon standard unit of measure that is ued to determine a vehicle's fuel efficiency.

There is a complete analysis of the metric available for download on EfficentDataCenters.com (efficientdatacenters.com), the company's new website which provides data center professionals the latest information on innovative advances in energy efficiency and a tool to calculate the efficiency of their data centers.

The latest installment of Emerson Network Power's Energy Logic white paper series advances the discussion started last year with the initial Energy Logic white paper, which offered a prioritized plan to optimizing energy use without compromising availability or flexibility.

The first Energy Logic analysis did not address data center efficiency directly, because without a universally accepted metric for data center output, efficiency cannot be accurately quantified.

This latest white paper builds on the previous paper by offering a sample metric to highlight the value of measuring data center efficiency, introducing the concept of Compute Units per Second to show how a metric can work.

CUPS is a relative measure of server output. Using data from multiple industry sources, Emerson Network Power calculated the change in CUPS between 2002 and 2007, providing a common server performance measure required to calculate efficiency.

The metric also points out that although data center energy consumption has increased in recent years, there have also been signficant gains in output and efficiency. Data center professionals can work with CUPS relative to their own data center in an online data center efficiency calculator. The analysis also highlights how a metric will help data center managers prioritize decisions.

Using the sample metric, the report shows that 10 prioritized strategies proposed in the original Energy Logic white paper increase data center efficiency by 3.6 times. The measurement also highlights that the faster replacement of IT technologies, virtualization and high-density architecture are the three strategies with the most impact.

To promote industry discussion and debate toward development of an agreed-upon approach, Emerson Network suggests that an efficiency metric should mdrive the right behavior, be available and published at the IT device level to help buyers make the right choice, and should be fully-scalable from the IT device to the data center level.

"Our goal with this next step in Energy Logic is to illustrate how a metric can uncover important insights about performance while helping data center managers prioritize efficiency efforts," says Jack Pouchet, director of energy initiatives for Emerson Network Power. "Ultimately, a universal metric will help data center professionals make significant improvement in energy efficiency while meeting growing performance demands."

Currently, the Power Usage Effectiveness metric has become widely accepted standard in the data center industry. The relatively new standard is used by The Green Grid and others to offer a simplified method of measuring the ratio of power delivered to IT equipment to the total amount of power consumed by the data center.

Dean Nelson, senior director of Sun Microsystems' global lab and data center design services division, recently noted that while he is a strong supporter of PUE ratings, many companies falsely distort their PUE metrics.