In fact, they’re collaborating on a book right now: Real-time power consumption measurements for data centers. Tahir Cader, a technical director for ISR Inc. is leading that effort. The plan is to publish this book through ASHRAE as a joint ASHRAE and Green Grid publication. You can expect this book to be available first quarter 2009.

“This is a really important book for data center operators,” Schmidt said. “It will help them understand where energy is being used in their data centers. What are the tools, where are the measurement points?” This book will explain how to calculate PUE and how to measure the various elements in the data center: pumps, chillers, cooling towers, and UPS systems. It will also explain how to measure humidity, lighting, and IT equipment load.

Other ASHRAE publications on the horizon
ASHRAE T.C. 9.9’s eighth book is in the final stages of the review process. It is called Particulate and gaseous contamination in datacom environments. Joe Prisco of IBM is leading that publication. TC 9.9 hopes to have it available for the book store at the ASHRAE winter conference Jan 24-28, 2009.

This book covers the nitty-gritty of gases and particulates that can contaminate data center equipment and cause failures. “What are the filters I can deploy? How do we get a handle on what is the acceptable limit of various gaseous contamination? Bromine, Chlorine, the sulfur contaminants — we don’t know what levels cause equipment failures,” Schmidt said. “We’ve had failure in the field because we’ve had gases in clients’ data centers. It does ruin equipment. You’ve got to be really careful.”

Two others publications are in the works: The extreme green data center and Green tips for datacom equipment centers. These publications won’t be ready until the summer conference 2009.

ASHRAE T.C. 9.9 and a new DOE data center workshop
ASHRAE T.C. 9.9 is also partnering with the Department of Energy to combine the DOE’s data center energy efficiency workshop with ASHRAE’s workshop in New York State, to create a national workshop by the end of the year, according to Schmidt. “It will be a one or two day event, sponsored by the DOE and ASHRAE. We would provide one of our datacom books for the workshop. This would be a great advertisement for TC 9.9.”

ASHRAE to integrate the new thermal envelop
The newly expanded environmental envelop approved in the last month for data center equipment will be part of an update to ASHRAE TC 9.9′s first book: Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing Environments. “That new envelop will allow people to use wider temperature and moisture range for datacom equipment — it’s really an important document,” Schmidt said.

The IT efficiency-focused group has published a new paper on the “productivity indicator.” Christian Belady, the principal power and cooling architect at Microsoft who was the driving force behind the PUE/DCIE metric, edited the paper and said it should be used as “a communication tool” between various members of a company – IT workers, data center facility folks and company executives.

“What this does is give you a quick visual of how you’re doing, especially if you’re communicating up to executives,” he said.

The paper suggests building a radial graph with five “spines,” with each spine representing a metric:

• DCIE
• Server utilization: The activity of the server processors relative to its maximum ability in the highest frequency state.
• Data center utilization: The amount of power drawn by the IT equipment relative to the actual capacity of the data center.
• Network utilization: Percentage of bandwidth used compared to bandwidth capacity.
• Storage utilization: The percentage of storage used compared to the overall storage capacity.

The paper doesn’t say how to come up with each of these numbers, but there are tools and software out there to get the data points for each of them (see the definition of storage utilization, for example). And if for some reason you are still trying to figure out how to measure network utilization, for example, you can still plot a graph using the productivity indicator, but with fewer spines. Here is a sample picture of a productivity indicator radial graph:

Belady and John Tuccillo, a Green Grid member from APC, said businesses can add target lines if they want as well. They could have targets for six months out, a year, and 18 months out. Companies can use it for whatever data center metrics they’re actually using. So if it’s not a pentagon, it might be a square or a triangle with four or three data points, respectively. In which case it might look like this:

Companies can also break down one of those categories, such as data center utilization, into a more detailed radial graph all its own, such as this:

They emphasized that this isn’t something that companies should use to compare to other companies. Instead, it’s a way for businesses to realize their existing energy situations and set target goals for themselves down the road.

“Different companies have different risk thresholds. A business may say, ‘You know what? My storage utilization, because of my business plan, should only be at 50%,’” Tucillo said. “One of the strengths of this tool is that it allows for the end user to weigh the spines to what their business practice is.”

“Ken [Brill of The Uptime Institute] has some valid points, clearly there needs to be more clarity and refinement in the definition to make it a rock solid benchmark. PUE is a “living metric” that the industry and in particular the Green Grid is working. But with all of the issues that are in the process of being resolved, here are three basic facts:
1) All metrics can and will be gamed regardless of the crispness of their definition. Show me a metric and I can come up with a way to game it.
2) Companies that are measuring PUE are improving their PUE over time. So they are improving their efficiency
3) Companies that are not measuring, are likely not improving. So these companies will be at a competitive disadvantage.

Microsoft is a company that is measuring (since 2004) and improving our PUE benchmarking against ourselves. There is no reason any other company cannot do this. Comparison with other companies is useful but less important to us as long as we demonstrate continuous improvement in our PUE. We hope that the issues people have with PUE for external benchmarking will be cleaned up in time but we do not plan on waiting until then for continuous improvement in our own operations.”

Here are a few key points to consider in the ongoing evolution of PUE:

Gaming PUE is going to happen
A lot of data center providers have included PUE ratios in press releases lately, many of them incredibly low. Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge says he’s seen it before. “That’s pretty much what happened with the Uptime Tier System, which set forth a four-tier rating system for data center reliability. Data centers began describing themselves as equivalent to ‘tier three-plus’ or even ‘tier five.’”

PUE will need to evolve into a dynamic quality control metric
Dave Ohara at GreenM3 has a great explanation of how data center pros should use PUE in a dynamic way. “What helped me to think of PUE as a dynamic number is to think of it as quality control metric. The quality of the electrical and mechanical systems and their operations over time are inputs into PUE. As load changes and servers will be turned off the variability of the power and cooling systems influence your PUE. So, PUE can now have a statistical range of operation given the conditions. This sounds familiar. It’s statistical process control.”

Standards and training needed on how and when to measure PUE
Data center managers getting started with a PUE measurement program need some guidance — where, when and how do you take the most meaningful measurements? Microsoft’s Mike Manos and Belady have put together an excellent PUE Strategy post on their blog, The Power of Software. This checklist takes PUE newbies from measuring by walking around with a clipboard to data center chargeback. The Uptime Institute’s Pitt Turner has a great webcast on how to measure PUE on UPS and PDU equipment. The next step will be to get everybody doing this in the same way — which is where ASHRAE TC 9.9 comes in. The organization supports PUE and announced plans to develop a publication that would standardize PUE measurement methodology in November 2007, but no word so far on the progress of that project.

Brill said he’s seen companies talking about a PUE of 0.8 — which is physically impossible. “There is a lot of competitive manipulation and gaming going on,” Brill said. “Our network members are tired of being called in by management to explain why someone has a better PUE than they do.”

If you’re going to compare your PUE against another company, you need to know what the measurement means. “You need to know what they’re saying and what they’re not saying,” Brill said. “Are you going to include the lights and humidification system? If you’re using free cooling six months of the year, do you report your best PUE?”

Brill conceded that The Green Grid’s PUE whitepaper has gained traction in the industry, spurring more action and debate than any other efficiency effort so far. But Brill takes issue with the measurement’s use of the term “power”. According to Brill, the fundamental problem with PUE is that it’s a snapshot in time. Power by definition is a spot measurement, Brill said. Power over time is “energy”. So power is measured in kilowatts, energy is measured in kilowatt hours.

Proponents of PUE like Microsoft’s Christian Belady have advocated measuring PUE over time, but Brill said that is not expressed explicitly in the standard.

I think it’s a bit of a stretch to assume C-Level execs are even aware of PUE (let alone calling data center staff out on the carpet about it).

I recently wrote an article about a data center manager that made huge efficiency improvements at a massive facility, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars through engineering projects. I asked him what his CIO thought about the data center efficiency he was achieving, and he told me the CIO had no idea. He’d never actually met the CIO…

Nonetheless, Brill makes a very important point. The first goal of PUE is to make a ratio to improve on internally. But the larger goal is to use the metric to compare data centers — as a benchmark against competitors, or as a way to compare various configurations, geographical locations, and technologies. Without standardization, comparative measurements will be meaningless.

Are your executives measuring you against competitors’ PUE? We’d like to hear from you.