Comments

"wow, so many errors in this article, I don't know where to start. So, I guess from the start.


"The harder issue is to look downstream, at what the electricity is used for within the IT equipment in the data centre. How much actual work do you get for each Joule of energy? This is a very significant thing to do, as it’s been argued that PUE is a blunt instrument, in danger of creating “false negatives” and unintended consequences."

The fact is that practically all IT manufacturers have telemetry in their products to serve up temperature, wattage, and other data. Fact also is, not many people use them.

"For instance, turning down the air conditioning will make servers run hotter and decrease PUE, which is good. But can also result in the servers’ built in fans working harder to cool the servers. The server fans are included in the IT power, so this makes PUE go down even further artificually - even though server fans are less efficiency than data center cooling systems."


Again, less than true. Variable speed fans, and allowing servers to run hotter is the norm, not the exception.

"Virtualising and consolidating servers can increase the utilisation of hardware - the proportion of time it is active. This might decrease the amount of energy going to the hardware, and actually put PUE up."

Again, wrong. It increases the amount of energy to a single device, but if you virtualise well, you have fewer devices, so PUE goes down.

"As such, it compares with SPECpower, which measures server performance in operations per Watt, and has been part of the EMA Energy Star program for some time."

C'mon, do you proof your articles? There is no EMA.
And further, Energy Star is not an efficiency metric, but an absolute energy metric.

"Of course, it is true that older servers are greener than newer ones in one sense. Replacing them increases your carbon footprint when you take into account the embodied energy, but I’m not sure that is what Power Assure is getting at here."

Did you really say that? Older servers cannot be greener than newer ones if for no reason that large IT supply chains are getting greener. Old stuff is old stuff.

"However, this adoption should not blind us to the fact that PAR4 is proprietary. According to Hirschmugl, it is “directly related to the the data center management scheme that Power Assure provides to its customers. The PAR4 rating and associated data specifically supports the parameters used by the Power Assure scheme.”"

Only useful statement in the article.

Not to mention the grammatical errors.

Want to really understand the way power management works in the enterprise? Happy to have a conversation.

Ken Baker"