PUE Audits at Cisco
As I have often note in my customer briefings, getting a handle on power and cooling issues in the data center is dependent on the proverbial three-legged stool: energy-efficient facilities, energy-efficient products, and getting educated on designing/implementing/operating energy efficient data centers. Of the three, I ultimately think the last one has the greatest impact. As operations teams more sophisticated in their energy efficiency strategies and get access to better tools to measure and manage energy consumption, companies will start get get ahead of their power and cooling challenges. It is for that reason that organizations such as The Green Grid (of which Cisco is a member) were created. If you have not checked out their website, I highly encourage you to do so—there are a wealth of resources there. Anyway, one of the metrics the Green Grid advocates is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and its reciprocal, Data Center Efficiency (DCE) as tools to help customers estimate the energy efficiency of their data centers. I highly encourage you to listen to Doug Alger discuss our experiences in conducting a PUE audit at one of our data centers and some of the caveats he notes on the results of the audit.
Anyone else running PUE audits or considering them? Would love to hear any thoughts or feedback you might have.
Posted by Omar Sultan at 08:17AM PST
Philip Petersen Jun 3, 2009
Hi Omar,
Really interested in this post and listened to the Doug Alger podcast.
My software company focuses on monitoring power consumption in lab and data centre environments. Value is in real-time monitoring and in real-time reporting of actionable management information, together with trending over time.
Have done some work with your company in the UK.
Would like to talk to you about this but do not have email details for you / Doug / Jimmy Ho