Top 10 Things Data Centers Forget About PUE

| CTO Edge (Apr 28 2011) Cloud Computing

1. In light of the reaction to Facebook’s recent announcement of its new Prineville, Ore., data center, with its 1.07 power usage effectiveness (PUE) claim, which seems hyper-efficient (or perhaps just hyper), as well as many other very aggressive PUE claims, I thought we should all take a deep breath and see what is sometimes “overlooked” in many data centers' PUE calculations: Power Distribution Losses: Downstream of the UPS, these losses are sometimes ignored; typically they can represent three to five percent for “copper” (I2R) losses, and sometimes up to five to seven percent if the PDUs contain a transformer. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) even found that a majority of the 120 original Energy Star for Data Centers program participants did not have the capability to measure the IT load “at the plug.” As a result, the EPA is willing to accept the UPS output as ... (Read Full Article)

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