Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Friday, March 29, 2024

Five Steps to Energy-Efficient IT Environment 

The Green Grid already offers metrics to help make efficient computing easier, such as PUE, WUE, and CUE. It also offers a summary of five steps data center operators and other IT professionals can use to become more energy efficient, to lower costs, and to move toward sustainability.

No matter how smart they are, people like straightforward, step-by-step instructions to make their jobs easier.

The Green Grid keeps trying to help that effort with effectiveness metrics such as PUE (power usage effectiveness), WUE (water usage effectiveness), and CUE (carbon usage effectiveness). Admit it; you probably only use PUE right now, if anything. So Green Grid offers five steps to making that metric work for you.

Green Grid board member Rob Aldrich, who is also an energy efficiency expert at Cisco and the technical lead for Cisco's Energy Optimization Services, offers the five-step program to energy recovery in an article on Baseline.

Step one is to calculate the PUE so that you know how efficient (or not) your data center is. If you don't know how to measure it, check out this document from Green Grid. If you've never measured it before, you'll probably find that you require two to three watts from the grid to deliver one watt to the servers.

Next tackle the issue of cooling. Data centers use a lot of power to cool. One to two watts disappear before reaching the servers. A study at a Green Grid member company found that efficient cooling could reduce costs by $300,000 per year.
Then go on to using virtualization make your machines work better. Paper on virtualization here.

Use enterprise energy management systems to monitor and control your servers, networks and storage devices. But if you want advice on server power management (SPM) from Green Grid, you have to become a member.

Finally, move on to WUE and CUE. After all, Facebook does it.

 

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