Found this article on HP’s Enterprise Magazine, discussing PUE for data center efficiency. At the time it was written, Chris Malone was an HP employee, but now he works for Google. Transforming Your Enterprise Magazine
Winter 2008
Metrics drive efficiency in the data center
Energy consumption and inefficiency within data centers is a well publicized problem and a key concern for IT organizations. Gartner has predicted that, "By 2011, more than 70 percent of U.S. enterprise data centers will face tangible disruptions related to floor space, energy consumption and/or costs."*
Before data center inefficiency can be resolved, experts say it must be characterized and tracked in a consistent manner.
“Our investigations have shown that most data centers are inefficient, expending more power for cooling than for running the IT equipment,” notes Dr. Chris Malone, Thermal Technologies Architect for HP. “Until recently, there was no established method for benchmarking data center energy consumption, making it extremely difficult to characterize the full extent of the problem.”
Malone suggests a standardized evaluation of and rating for data center energy consumption to help companies determine:
- How well is a data center running relative to others in the industry?
- Are new data centers more efficient than the old ones?
- Which data centers should be retired?
- Do best practices really improve efficiency?
- Do new technologies actually perform as suppliers promise?
HP didn’t quote Christian Belady who was a PUE innovator at HP.
For those of you who didn’t know Christian is now at Microsoft. Chris is at Google. Too bad HP couldn’t keep these guys at HP. Otherwise, we would be discussing HP’s innovations in data center efficiency.