Encouraged by the industry’s widespread acceptance of two data center energy efficiency metrics it has developed, the Green Grid has embarked on a much more ambitious project. The organization has been working with government and industry representatives in the U.S., U.K. and Japan on something the Grid’s Executive Director Larry Vertal calls “global harmonization of metrics.”

The project’s aim is to standardize globally new data center efficiency metrics as they are being developed by various organizations around the world, to coordinate their development with government regulators and to promote the new metrics’ use by those regulators in policies they draft.

In the U.S., the organization is working with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. It is engaged with the British Computer Society in the U.K. – a large industry association that is in turn closely engaged with the U.K. government. In Japan, the Green Grid works with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, the Green IT Promotion Council and Tokyo Metropolitan Government.

Japanese colleagues encourage collaboration
The initiative was “largely developed out of global acceptance of the Green Grid metrics for PUE and DCiE,” Vertal said. The idea was suggested by Japanese representatives, with GITPC in the lead, he recalled. “They said, ‘look: PUE and DCiE are getting huge acceptance. We’re working on a lot of ideas too. Let’s get all these stakeholders together and start talking about all the various ideas we have for metrics to make sure that, globally, this will follow the kind of acceptance that we saw with PUE and DCiE metrics, so that everybody will be aligned.”

The first stakeholder meeting took place in March in Washington, D.C. The Green Grid hosted it in concert with the EPA and the Department of Energy. Among participants were developers of the E.U. Code of Conduct for Data Centres and a large Japanese delegation, including METI and GITPC representatives.

A joint working group emerged out of that meeting that has since been actively working on developing additional metrics and following a roadmap the Green Grid had developed for PUE and DCiE, Vertal said.

Larry Vertal became the Green Grid's Executive Director in July, 2009

New metrics in the works
One of the metrics the group is focusing on is what Vertal calls a “green energy coefficient metric,” whose development is led by Japanese members of the group. This metric will take into account any extra energy a data center may generate and feed back into the utility grid. Scientists from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California are also closely involved in the development of this metric.

The Green Grid is working with the EPA and the U.S. energy department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on development of another metric: Data Center energy Productivity. While a PUE figure tells how much of the total power a data center consumes powers the actual IT equipment, DCeP aims to determine how much useful work the IT equipment performs.

“Determining useful work is a whole level above other metrics,” Vertal said. The team has already demonstrated that DCeP could be applied to an existing facility and has made recommendations on how to perform the measurements, he added.

eBay’s Charles Kalko, who leads the online auction company’s Operation Excellence Program, said at the DatacenterDynamics conference in Seattle earlier this month that eBay has been exploring DCeP and working on ways to apply the metric to its data centers.

The Green Grid is engaged with the Department of Energy in several other ways, including development of the Data Center Certified Energy Practitioner Program. Holders of such certification will be qualified to assess a data center’s overall energy efficiency and recommend measures that can be taken to increase it.

What’s next?
Next step for the global metric harmonization initiative is for all groups involved to issue reports on their work within the next several months, Vertal said. Another stakeholder meeting will most likely take place by the year’s end to review the work done and to develop the timeline for further work. The Grid’s director said it was too early to tell what exact shape the effort’s final group of metrics will take or when the industry and regulators should expect those metrics to arrive.

“Acceptance of PUE and DCiE globally led to the understanding by all the stakeholders that there was such a (widespread) need for a common vocabulary and rigor around these types of metrics,” Vertal said. Next step for the industry is a larger and more uniform set of metrics.

Related news: Green Grid invites comment on proposed proxy measurements for productivity
Related feature: U.S. data centers lag in measuring efficiency/carbon footprint
Related video: Applying global standards to PUE (an interview with Larry Vertal)