This is not just another article about power usage effectiveness (PUE) and how to measure or improve it. Just when you thought you were a responsible, efficiency conscious data center manager and were comfortable with your data center’s PUE, ASHRAE’s proposed new 90.4 standard may be about to move your cheese. Are you prepared to prove your power usage effectiveness (PUE)of your facility to the local building inspector?
The Green Grid (TGG) first introduced the PUE metric in 2007 that started the data center industry thinking about the energy efficiency of the physical facility. Its purpose was to help data center operators to baseline and improve their own facility. PUE has been criticized by some, since it only covers the energy efficiency of the facility (not the IT systems), however, that was its clearly stated purpose. Since then, PUE has been updated over the years and is now the process of becoming an ISO standard. Nonetheless, it is its underlying simplicity that allowed managers to easily calculate (or guess) a facility’s PUE that has been key to its adaption as a de facto industry metric.