Green Grid unveils new datacentre energy efficiency metrics

The emergence of global standards for measuring the energy efficiency of datacentres moved a step closer yesterday with the launch of a raft of new research papers from green IT industry consortium The Green Grid.

The consortium has released an updated version of its Datacentre Energy Efficiency Metrics whitepaper that incorporates infrastructure efficiency into the original metrics.

It also said that it expects its Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Datacentre efficiency metric for assessing the proportion of power going into a datacentre that is used to power the IT kit to be adopted by the industry and used by all datacentres to report their efficiency.

The group also released a new analysis identifying seven high-level configurations for datacentre power distribution; announced that it was working on new metrics for datacentre productivity which include computational efficiency; and reiterated its intention to develop an industry standard rating system for datacentres.

John Pflueger, a member of The Green Grid’s Technical Committee, said that the development of a rating system that would identify the best and the worst datacentres based on their energy efficiency, resilience and performance was a "complex and challenging piece of work", but insisted that with The Green Grid drawing on expertise from right across the IT industry such a labelling system could be developed.

The research comes as The Green Grid announced it has now recruited 102 members since its launch earlier this year and has signed a memorandum of understanding with industry lobby group the Information Technology Industry Council that will see the two industries work together.

Larry Vertal, director of The Green Grid, said that the relationship should help give the consortium greater insight into public policy initiatives that stand to impact the IT industry and better inform its green IT research efforts.