The Australian authorities are looking to develop their own version of the PUE metric in order to better measure the efficiency of the data centers located 'down under'.

The idea is to create a new version of Australia's existing performance-based rating system for buildings, which is called 'Nabers Website' NABERS (National Australian Built Environment Rating System), with something more suitable for data centers.

NABERS is a national initiative managed by NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water (DECCW). Essentially, NABERS allows Australian authorities to judge the environmental impact of existing buildings (commercial offices, hotels or even residential homes etc). It also provides a simple indication of how well a property owner is managing the environmental impact of their building, compared to neighbours and peers.

Last year, DECCW revealed it was looking to develop and implement a data centre specific version of NABERS see <a data-cke-saved-href="\" href="%5C%22http://www.energyrating.gov.au/library/pubs/200905-data-centre-efficiency.pdf%5C%22" data-cke-saved-name="\" name="\&quot;Energy" report\"="" class="\&quot;external\&quot;">Data Centre Energy Efficiency Product Profile Report.

According to CRN Australia, a questionnaire has been developed for CIOs and other data centre managers in order to help develop the metric. The problem apparently with the NABERS rating is that it does not reflect the unique power consumption of the data centre.

For example, according to CRN, a building that otherwise has a good NABERS ratings, may achieve a poor overall score under NABERS because the building also houses a data center, which the NABERS ratings do not factor in. Therefore the Australians are seeking something specifically to deal with the issue of energy.
It seems that the Australians are those not entirely satisfied with the most widely-used power efficiency metric within data centres, which is power usage effectiveness (PUE).

PUE was developed by The Green Grid consortium to provide a clear answer to the primary issue surrounding energy efficiency within the data center which is how much power is devoted to driving the actual computing/IT components (e.g. servers) versus the ancillary support elements such as cooling and lighting. Last month the Green Grid announced it was developing new metric for data center energy reuse, in an effort to create more incentives for data center operators to increase their facilities' energy efficiency. The new metric aims to put a figure on the amount of energy that gets recycled.