Power Usage Effectiveness Metrics to Measure Efficiency and Performance of Data Centers

Abstract

Abstract:Intensifying computation demand from enterprises has driven the growth of large, multifaceted data centers to manage current Internet, financial, commercial, and business applications. A data center comprises thousands of servers and other equipment that require substantial amounts of power to operate. This condition results in numerous challenges for the data center industry, such as massive energy consumption, underutilization of installed equipment, emission of greenhouse gases, and effect on global warming. This paper highlights the significance of identifying metrics to determine the performance and efficiency of a data center, which can help such a facility achieve operational cost savings through proper implementation of performance-measuring metrics. This paper discusses the implementation of Power Usage Effectiveness metrics in a tier-level data center in Pakistan. The results show that the overall performance value of the facility is 3.3, which indicates poor and inefficient operations.

Future views on waste heat utilization – Case of data centers in Northern Europe

“…The PUE variables are difficult to measure and calculate when facilities or primary equipment are shared. With energy reuse, the PUE value could go below 1.0, but this is not allowed, which is contrary to PUE definition [22]. PUE ignores IT load changes, and it does not address the DC utilization level [26].…”

“…The DC industry is lacking a standard method to categorize installed hardware and software resources and workloads into measurable groups for power usage calculations [22]. Commonly known metrics do not distinguish the energy efficiency of a DC communication system from computing servers; both are IT equipment [26].…”

“…A service level agreement (SLA) should complement the measuring values. A metric should be cost-effective and should consider: (1) DC diversity, (2) segmenting DC prior to applying a metric, (3) security and constraints, (4) usability and motivation for businesses and users, (5) provision of numerical information, and (6) evaluation of cooperative efforts for energy-efficiency improvement [22].…”

Measuring Energy Efficiency of Cloud Datacenters

“…However, there are some common characteristics required for all the metrics used. Some guidelines have been mentioned in [8] and listed as follows.  The name used for the metric should be sensible and self-explanatory.…”

Energy efficiency and environmental considerations for green data centres

“…To reduce IT's environmental problems and to create a sustainable environment, we call upon the IT sector as well as every computer user to green their IT systems, as well as the way they use these systems (Uddin et al, 2014). Over the years, the use of IT has exploded in several areas, improving our lives and work and offering convenience along with several other benefits.…”