The Green Grid is working on a metric that will report, in energy terms, the measurement of how many computations, be they transactions or web pages being served that is done by the IT equipment within a data center.
In an interview at DatacenterDynamicsLondon:08, Jim Pappas, Green Grid board director told DatacenterDyanamics Focus that PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) is one of two major measurements.
"[PUE is about] efficiency of the data center itself and I think of that in terms of facilities. PUE doesn't care what the IT load is- whether you are using new servers, old servers or valve servers it is about how effectively are you delivering power. If it is a 10MW IT load, it is a 10MW IT load."
"We can see PUE numbers improving - when we started it was up around 3, now it is probably closer to 2 or 2.5. The theoretical maximum is 1 - the optimum, that's the limit that you could achieve - that's the best you could do, after that no more progress to be made. That's 100% of the power coming in would be going to the IT equipment. Of course we know that we could continue making progress - beyond PUE - how much work does the data center power get done - noone builds a data center to see how to convert one set of power to a different set of power. They build a data center to conduct a transaction or serve web pages, they have some sort of computational workload to do."
"The next set of measurements is really Data Center Power (DCP). How much work you get done for the power coming into the data center. That is the measure. That is an unbounded problem because we can always improve how much work can you get done for the electrical power coming into the data center. We always could continue to improve. Longer term we'll continue moving to Data Center Power - and the two in conjunction become a very powerful tool at that point. "PUE is about how effectively you build the facility, DCP is how effective are you in putting the IT into the facillity that will give you great computing output." Pappas said "When you purchase a car, you look at miles per gallon, that is a purchasing decision, when you operate the car you learn how to operate it efficiently."
Pappas said some of the developments could only be described as a work in progress and that technical details had yet to be ratified by the Green Grid's technical committees and voted on by the board. It is expected that the metric will be formally introduced in the first half of 2009.
For now Pappas said The Green Grid has techniques to help you operate efficiently and tune IT to keep it operating at a high level of efficiency at all times - productivitity metrics are a good first step into that area - what it starts doing is measure 5 different areas such as server utilisation, network utilisation, storage utilisation, break it down into data center components, and measure each individually, then you can plot using a radio graph and get a clear picture in what are your goals and how effective you are at reaching those goals. It is a good thing to do today."
Meanwhile the Green Grid has further opened up to end user organisations with the formation of an End User Advisory board. Companies including ebay, Walt Disney and Verizon have joined up. "We wanted to acknowledge that we need to develop. The Green Grid is not something for a bunch of equipment vendors but something for end users to be able to use."
The Green Grid started around 18 months ago with 10 IT vendors as original members. It's current membership is up around 200 organisations.