ITGreening.com met with Simon Robinson, the 451 Group servers and storage specialist, at the Storage Networking Europe 2008 show in Frankfurt at the end of October. According to Simon one of the key issues in the uptake of Green IT is the lack of standards where measurements are concerned. “There’s no real standard and different tools give different results. Without reliable metrics, it’s difficult for the enterprise to justify upgrading the datacenter.” If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it…
All is not lost, though, and Simon points to two metrics developed by the Green Grid as being the most useful and reliable measurement methods available today. Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) measures the ratio of the total power consumption of the datacenter facility, compared with the power consumption of the data processing equipment it houses. Datacenter Efficiency (DCiE) is simply the inverse of PUE, the ratio between equipment power consumption and overall facility power consumption. A tool recently introduced by EDSA Corp as part of its power management software allows datacenter managers to measure and monitor their PUE/DCiE in real time.
