Critical Issues for Data Center Energy Efficiency

This book chapter is based on a project entitled ‘Measuring Data Centre Efficiency’ (Pattinson and Cross, 2013) funded under the JISC Greening ICT initiative, call for projects 14/10 of October 2010. More specifically, it resides under initiative I of that call, “Rapid Innovation in ICT”. The metering methodology employed for this project fostered metering at varying granularity (e.g. measurement of energy use for individual devices/location of the data center; measurement of energy use for aggregated devices/locations). The project provided real experimental data relating to the accurate measurements of energy consumption in different parts of the data centre. Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) was calculated based on the collated data and used to provide trends and comparative analysis of the data center efficiency.