Green IT. It’s the buzzword of the year, and it’s something with which you should acquaint yourself no matter what your specialty in the wide world of IT happens to be. Herman Chan and Greg More of GreenerComputing, pretty much the best online resource for learning Green IT strategies, have laid out the basics of how to measure the “greenness” of various data center strategies, and they say it’s important to get up to speed.
Based on the simple premise that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” data centers are undertaking steps to measure device-level power consumption. No longer do rule-of-thumb estimates suffice — because they can turn out to be just plain wrong, leading to unnecessary and sometimes quite substantial costs. Devices that were thought to be consuming very little power may be consuming quite a lot, even while simply sitting idle doing no useful work.
The writers go into detail about “power usage effectiveness” (PUE), the ratio of the total energy used by a data center, including IT equipment, and the energy consumed by the IT equipment only. The total energy includes lighting, cooling and air movement equipment and inefficiencies in electricity distribution within the data center. The IT equipment portion is that equipment which performs computational tasks. A ratio of 1.0 would be perfect, but it’s impossible to achieve. Generally speaking, the closer you can get to 1.0, the better.
Then Chan and More go on a tour of a data center, pointing out all the things that can and should be measured. It’s an interesting and enlightening exercise, well worth a read.
Tags: Green IT
