Do you know your PUE?

PUE stands for Power Usage Effectiveness and it is rapidly becoming the number to know. In the past, datacenter managers were simply asked to provide enough space, power and cooling to support the IT equipment. Now, the same managers are being asked to do it efficiently. PUE can be a helpful benchmark.

Introduced by the Green Grid, PUE is a measure of efficiency. It is defined as: the total facility power consumed divided by the total IT equipment power consumed. The total facility power is measured at the utility meter for datacenters. (For mixed-use facilities like an office building that contains a datacenter, only the power needed for the server/datacenter room should be measured or even estimated.) The facility power includes everything that supports the IT equipment including power, cooling, lighting, etc.

The IT equipment power is the load associated with servers, storage, networking …