google offers tips on lowering your pue - by Paula Bernier

Views and Opinions on Green IT (May 4 2010)

1. 

   Google is obviously a major data center operator, so when the company talks, people listen.

    Well, Bill Weihl, green energy czar at Google, was talking recently about the company’s green data center initiatives early this week at Green: Net 2010 in San Francisco.

    Of course, he mentioned how and why the search giant requested permission from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to buy and sell power. (It got the green light from the FERC, by the way.) The reason, he said, was just to give the company more flexibility in procuring energy for its data centers.

    He also offered up some details on the PUE ratings and goals of its data centers. PUE, which stands for power usage effectiveness, is a metric used to determine the energy efficiency of a data center. It’s reached by dividing the power entering a data center by the power used to run the infrastructure within it.

    Anyhow, Weihl says through its special data center design, Google has been able to reach 1.2 and 1.5 PUE ratings in a world populated mostly by data centers with PUE ratings of two, he said.

    Weihl suggests that data center operators and tenants interested in lowering their PUE might want to contain their hot equipment so it’s separate from the other gear. Google sections its hot stuff off with plastic curtains and metal end caps, he says.

    And while you obviously don’t want to let equipment to get too hot, Weihl says it makes sense not to keep it too cool in the data center as a whole. Google maintains a temperature of 80 degrees.

    Finally, he says, if you can avoid using air conditioners, do it. Pushing cool outside air into the data center is one option that can offer green and cost-saving benefits in the data center, he says.

    

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