By 2015, according to Gartner, 80 percent of new large data centers will be the using the power usage effectiveness (PUE) measurement devised by The Grid Grid to report on the efficiency of their operations. PUE is not perfect, and there are efforts underway to support and develop measurements that provide insight into the useful work performed by IT equipment as it relates to the energy it consumes. Nonetheless, PUE represents a critical step in linking IT operations with their energy costs and environmental impact. It also helps when the EPA adopts PUE as a cornerstone of its Energy Star for Data Centers initiative, though in a varied form.
So, get used to seeing PUE in the years to come. And if you’re operating a data center, get ready to be able to generate the stat (The Grid Grid’s archives are packed great resources on PUE). But that’s not the only data center insight Gartner’s sharing with the green IT crowd.
According to Rakesh Kumar, a vice president with the research firm, energy costs amount to 12 percent of data center expenditures. Server sales will grow 5 percent year over year for the next two years as the global economy improves. Kumar also expects energy measurement across virtual machines to appear within the next four to five years. And that’s good news for projects like Microsoft’s Joulemeter that have virtual machine energy management in their crosshairs.
This theme of achieving more with less runs through Gartner’s recent recommendations. Other trends it suggests monitoring closely include virtualization, cloud computing and what it calls “complex resource tracking,” or monitoring energy consumption so that you can dynamically move workloads to save energy. There is a good analysis of these topics here: http://bit.ly/IBGreenGartner