The Green Grid Forum 2013 Tackles Metrics, Standards
This year’s the Green Grid Forum opened up a dialogue about efficiencies and regulations within the data center industry, giving organizations the opportunity to standardize and measure the amount of energy they use.
The agenda of the forum included the value of collaborative regulatory activity, software and IT hardware efficiencies, and financial and operational efficiencies. These are all important to advance resource efficiency for data centers, especially as the environmental impact increases in significance.
Because there are so many standards organizations and regulatory bodies, each with their own life cycle states, product ranges, and requirements, the Green Grid used the forum to help consolidate this information and provide the industry with the methodologies to evaluate a data center.
To assist the industry with the evaluation process, the forum gave a tutorial on the Green Grid’s Datacenter Maturity Model (DCMM). Released in 2011, the model teaches attendees how they can evaluate their data center and IT portfolio.
The DCMM was developed so users can measure their current performance, determine their levels of maturity, and identify the steps and innovations required to achieve greater energy efficiency and sustainability. The model encapsulates every aspect of the data center including power, cooling, compute, storage, and network.
Attendees were also given an opportunity to be trained on the DCMM’s Assessment Tool so they could perform a quick assessment of their own data center.
Developed as a compliment to the DCMM, the forum introduced the Electronics Disposal Efficiency Metric (EDE), which helps end-users measure how successful they are with the responsible management of decommissioned equipment. End-users can then use these measurements and set goals to improve how they dispose of IT assets.
The Green Grid Forum 2013 also promoted Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) as an ISO standard. PUE compares the energy used by a data center to the amount of energy that reaches the IT equipment, revealing how much is lost to other equipment.
One of the panels at the forum will discuss what it would mean for the data center industry if regulators and governments all over the world had ISO standards to reference. Having PUE as an ISO standard will eliminate a lot of confusion surrounding PUE and other metrics, providing a simple method for standardizing measurements.
Related Articles
Google Adapts its Ten Rules to Datacenter Building
Improving Computational Capabilities Using Green at CEBio
