A Framework for Data Center Productivity
Recent studies by industry and government have highlighted the issue of rapidly escalating data center energy consumption. Faced with the limited availability of additional electrical energy, many CIOs are forced to consider relocating their data centers or adding additional capacity situated in remote locations.
For those who have an abundant supply of power, there is still the issue of the ever increasing power bill. A fundamental issue facing the data center manager is, “How do I control my energy costs without impacting the delivery of critical it services my customers demand?”
New tools are needed that allow the continuous monitoring of the work product of the data center as a function of energy consumed. Up to now, standardized tools to measure the productivity of a data center have not been available. This paper from the Green Grid presents:
- A technical analysis of the problem of assessing the energy efficiency of a data center and the IT equipment that composes the data center;
- An examination of various power and energy efficiency metrics that have been proposed, and a discussion of their attributes and applicability; and
- An analysis of ways in which those attributes fall short of providing the comprehensive tools necessary to optimize data center energy utilization.
This paper introduces a new family of data center resource optimization metrics designated collectively as Data Center Productivity (DCP) metrics and presents the first derivative metric within this family called Data Center energy productivity (DCep). the DCep metric provides a unique analytical tool that may be used to track the overall work product of a data center per unit of energy expended to produce this work. while DCep in its current form is only applicable to improvements in a single data center, it is hoped that this work will provide a framework to develop similar metrics for comparing across different data centers.
