Global leaders from industry and government reach agreement for measuring data centre energy productivity

Data centres have become an increasingly important part of most business operations in the twenty-first century. Today, a global taskforce on data centre efficiency announced agreement on standard approaches and reporting conventions for data centre energy productivity (DCeP).

The latest recommendation from the taskforce is for data centres to define attributes and measure DCeP, an equation that quantifies useful work that a data centre produces based on the amount of energy it consumes. DCeP allows each organisation to define “useful work” as is applicable to its business, thus creating a custom and meaningful metric. For example, a retail business may use number of sales as the measure for useful work, while an online search company may use the number of searches completed.

“Overall, global data centre traffic is estimated to grow threefold from 2012 to 2017* and although data centres are becoming more efficient, their total energy use is projected to grow,” said Deva Bodas, principal engineer and lead architect for Server Power Management at Intel Corporation and board member for The Green Grid® Association. “With escalating demand for data centre operations and rising energy costs, it is essential for data centre owners and operators to monitor, assess and improve performance using energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emission metrics. This is why the recommendations of the taskforce are so important.”

In October 2012, the taskforce reached consensus on the use of the Green Energy Coefficient (GEC), Energy Reuse Factor (ERF) and Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) metrics. Previously, it announced agreement on guidelines and specific measurement protocols for Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), a metric originally developed by The Green Grid Association. All of the taskforce’s prior recommendations are included in the latest public memo, issued last week.

The global taskforce on data centre efficiency is comprised of representatives from: The Green Grid Association; U.S. Department of Energy’s Save Energy Now and Federal Energy Management Programs (March 2009 – October 2012); U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR Program; European Commission - Joint Research Centre, Data Centres Code of Conduct; Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry; and, Japan’s Green IT Promotion Council. With this fourth and final public memo, the task force concludes five years of work to harmonise directions designed to improve key energy efficiency metrics within data centres.