Green Grid Rolls out Data Center Metrics for Water, Energy Reuse

At its annual Technical Forum last week, IT industry sustainability group The Green Grid continued to expand its number of metrics to track data center sustainability efforts.

Building on its widely adopted Power Usage Effectiveness ratio (PUE), which measures how much of the energy entering a data center goes toward computing instead of lighting, HVAC and other facility functions, the Green Grid added a number of metrics that give a more complete and holistic view of data center sustainability.

Among the new metrics:

• WUE, or Water Usage Effectiveness, which we which we first reported on here, is a metric that assesses the water used on-site in operating a data center, including water used for humidification and water evaporated on-site for energy production or cooling of the data center and its support systems.

• ERE, or Energy Reuse Effectiveness, is a metric for measuring the benefit of reusing energy from a Data Center, and provides operators with greater visibility into the energy efficiency opportunities in identifying and recovering energy from their facilities.  

• DCcE, or Data Center Compute Efficiency, is a metric that enables data center operators to determine the efficiency of their compute resources, which allows them to identify areas of inefficiency. DCcE is an important piece of the ongoing work by The Green Grid to determine data center productivity.

In addition to its role as a standards-creating organization, the Green Grid also released a number of tools to help data center managers and operators continue to refine their efforts. Included among the new tools are:

• A Data Center Maturity Model, a system that helps data center operators determine how resource-efficient their facilities are, from “Minimal” to “Visionary.” The DCMM touches on every aspect of the data center, from power and cooling to storage and network systems.

• The group also release a white paper, “An Analysis of Server Virtualization Utility Incentives” lays out the benefits of server virtualization in an effort to expand the use of the technology, which boosts energy efficiency through higher utilization rates of servers.

The Green Grid has posted a number of new resources, covering these and many other topics discussed at the Technical Forum last week, at TheGreenGrid.org.