Green Grid Metrics: Describing Datacenter Power Efficiency

Overview

The Green Grid is an association of IT professionals seeking to dramatically raise the energy efficiency of datacenters through a series of short-term and long-term proposals. For the short term, The Green Grid is proposing the use of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Datacenter Efficiency (DCE) metrics, which enable datacenter operators to quickly estimate the energy efficiency of their datacenters, compare the results against other datacenters, and determine if any energy efficiency improvements need to be made. In the long term, The Green Grid is proposing the Datacenter Performance Efficiency (DCPE) metric and a refined version of the PUE metric be adopted for all major power-consuming subsystems in the datacenter.