The 5 Pillars for Building a Smart Datacenter: #1 PUE, DCiE and WUE

Intro

Welcome to the first (of five) ebook of the series: The 5 pillars to build a Smart Datacenter. What makes a datacenter “smart”? Is it a well-planned consumption of electricity? Or is it a wise use of the resources? Is it just software or does hardware play an important role as well? In these five Submer ebooks, we will describe the strategic, practical and economic pillars that you should take in consideration if you want to make your datacenter smarter and more sustainable.

1. PUE, DCiE and WUE
2. Power Density and Space Efficiency
3. Software Defined Power
4. Resources and Energy Consumption
5. Costs

Let’s start with three fundamental metrics that can help you to determine how efficient your datacenter is: Power Usage Effectiveness (better know as PUE), its reciprocal Datacenter Infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE) and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE).

1. PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness)

The Power Usage Effectiveness is the ratio of the total amount of energy used by a datacenter facility to the energy delivered to computing equipment:

The lower your PUE is, the more efficient your datacenter is. Using PUE as a measurement helps understand how efficient a datacenter is and compare with similar datacenters in similar locations or with similar environmental conditions, to determine whether there are areas that could be improved by adopting new technology and by applying the best practices and architectural choices.

The PUE of a datacenter can be affected by some variables that are specific for each site:

• Utilization rate of the datacenter facility (if the facility houses a lot of IT equipment, it will have lower PUEs than facilities not completely occupied by IT equipment).
• Age and design of the facility (usually, the newer the facility is, the more efficient and modern is the equipment in terms of design and, consequently, of energy consumption).
• Energy efficiency of the IT equipment (usually, newer IT equipment can handle greater workloads while reducing power consumption).

“The lower your PUE, the more efficient your datacenter.

Join Pol Valls Soler, Co-Founder of Submer to discover more details about these three metrics:

NOTE OF UPDATE: 
Submer is currently working on an updated version of this ebook to include updated and new information including the ISO/IEC 30134 Datacenter KPI’s.