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Green Grid launches online efficiency tools for data centres

Energy efficiency proponent The Green Grid has launches two new free online tools to help businesses manage the power consumption of their data centres.

The online tools, which will be available this spring, allow data centre managers to determine how much energy they are currently using and model potential improvements.

The new PUE Estimator enables facility operators input data at regular intervals to determine the data centre’s power usage effectiveness, which shows how much energy is used by the centre and its IT equipment.

The PUE metric was devised by The Green Grid and is catching on as an effective way of measuring performance over time and comparing the efficiency of data centres. The typical data centre has a PUE of 2.0, indicating that less than half of the energy supplied to the data centre is actually used for computing power – with the rest going on cooling, system losses and other factors.

The most efficient rating would be 1.0, which would mean that all the energy supplied to the centre reaches the IT equipment. To have a sub-1.0 score, which some data centres claim, a centre would have to have its own on-site power generation.

Meanwhile, the Power Efficiency Estimator helps businesses planning to build new or refurbish data centres to model the efficiency of different technologies or power topologies. The tool takes into account factors such as the data centre’s workload, availability and any space constraints.

“The hands-on development of tools… makes it easier for end-users to drive practical improvements,” says Christian Belady of Microsoft and treasurer of The Green Grid.

For further information:
www.thegreengrid.org/

09 February 2010

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