What’s Cooking With PUE Today?

One thing at the top of many data center’s facility manager’s wish list is the desire for a low PUE or Power Usage Effectiveness.

PUE is a term coined to measure your data center’s efficiency and, to put it in simple terms, it is a ratio of power entering your data center facility to the power utilized for computing infrastructure alone in your data center. Thus, a lower value of the ratio would imply higher efficiency and this is what drives companies across the world to lower their PUE ratings.

The massive green drive undertaken by Internet giants like Yahoo, Facebook, Google, etc. are efforts to reduce their data center PUE to the minimum. Google has an average PUE rating of 1.12 for the data center facilities it owns and the company hopes to reduce this further. It has recently purchased a wind farm to supply power to its infrastructural facilities.

Yahoo has spent over $200 million in order to achieve a PUE rating of 1.07 for its key data center facility in Lockport, NY by powering it using hydroelectric power generated from the Niagara falls.

The growing importance of PUE for enterprises can be very well understood if we look at two survey reports published by the Uptime Institute over a period of 5 years. The former report published in 2007 showed that the average PUE rating among the surveyed data center facilities was at an alarmingly high 2.5. Surprisingly, the second report published in 2012 showed a dramatic improvement with the average figures topping out at just 1.8-1.89.

So when so many enterprises are focusing on PUE as a key parameter in their operations, are you missing out on it? What can you do about it? Lifeline Data Denters offer some of the greenest and most reliable data center infrastructure. Visit our website to know more.

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.