How eBay Built Its New Energy Efficient Data Center
By building its new data center for energy efficiency, eBay hopes to ready itself for larger data loads while reducing its future power bills. Read More
With more than 100 million eBay users buying and selling $2,000 worth of goods every second, data centers are a big deal to the e-commerce company. And maintaining all that data requires plenty of energy: eBay’s data centers consume more than half of all the power used by the company.
The company developed its new Phoenix facility, dubbed Project Mercury, with guidance from The Green Grid on best practices for energy efficient and adaptable data centers. That guidance includes The Green Grid’s Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric, which measures how much energy coming into a data center is used to power computing instead of cooling, lighting or other equipment.
When planning its Phoenix data center, eBay stated it wanted a facility with a PUE of 1.2 and used that goal to guide its decisions. (Lower numbers indicate higher effectiveness.) The company said that the data center had a site average PUE of 1.35 during one week in January, with a 1.26 PUE at its best. Partial PUEs around 1.04 have also been recorded.
