The Green Grid, the IT industry’s leading voice for advancing energy efficiency in data centres and business computing ecosystems, today announced that the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric, published by The Green Grid in 2007, has now achieved industry alignment specific to recommendations on how to measure PUE in dedicated data centre facilities.

The Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric identifies data centre infrastructure efficiency by comparing the total amount of energy consumed by the data centre to the total amount of energy consumed by the Information Technology (IT) equipment. “Driving industry alignment of PUE through consistent measurement and reporting processes represents a significant step in improving data centre energy efficiency,” said Dan Azevedo, Symantec representative and Board member of The Green Grid. “The guidance specific to calculating PUE for data centres that use multiple energy sources (electric, natural gas, water, etc.) is substantial to ensuring PUE is measured and reported equitably. This task force is working to drive clear, consistent recommendations with a single voice.”

In addition to affirming PUE as the industry’s preferred data centre infrastructure efficiency metric, the
report from the task force provides guidance on how to calculate PUE from weighted energy types, based on source energy, outlines four recommended measurement categories for PUE, as a subset of The Green Grid’s measurement methods & provides guidance for renewable energy sources, combined heat and power plants, and reuse of data centre energy to data centre operators.