APC by Schneider Electric’s online IT Carbon and Energy Allocation Calculator Trade-Off Tool demonstrates the impact that data center efficiency, load characteristics, and location have upon the carbon and energy cost allocation between servers, storage, networking, and physical infrastructure equipment. The Tool has set defaults for electricity cost per kilowatt and CO2emissions (kg/kWh), although the user can opt to override these values as well as change the currency according to the location of the data center. Using these inputs the IT Carbon and Energy Cost Calculator provides a series of outputs including the annual quantity and cost of energy used by the data center as well as the carbon produced as a result, together with the same figures on a per server basis. Altering the data center PUE via a simple slider, the user can see the effect that increased efficiency has upon the total cost of running the facility as well as the 15-yr cost (e.g., the facility lifetime cost) of running each server. A visual dashboard also indicates the division of energy between infrastructure and IT equipment as PUE is changed-the simple rule being, the larger the green slice of the pie, the better PUE.
