Data Centres Down Under

I recently attended the 2010 DataCenterDynamics event in Sydney as the keynote speaker on behalf of the BCS Data Centre Specialist Group and Romonet.

Sydney was a return to a market that DCD left some years ago and by all accounts have been missed in the interim! Anyway, they're back now and judging by the hundreds of people that attended that day, it was a warm welcome back.

I spoke about the international efforts to further the development and harmonise data centre metrics, being led by a group of individuals representing a number of credible organisations from around the world. Organisations such as the US Department of Energy, US Environmental Protection Agency, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, Japanese GreenIT Promotions Council, Green Grid, European Commission and Japanese Ministry for Economy Trade and Investment.

My own involvement is via the European Commission JRC and Paolo Bertholdi who I assist and represent at the regular metric meetings.

DCD Sydney was a great place to test the extent to which the knowledge and understanding about metrics has proliferated the world. I carried out a straw poll and asked for a show of hands from those that had heard of the following metrics, below are the results:

What this shows to me is that despite its shortcomings, PUE (and DCIE) continues to be the only really globally recognised data centre metric. This is by no means a bad thing but I think it does show what I think others have started to realise and that's the fact that 'data centre productivity' metric may well be a step too far for now.

I of course prefer the approach we've taken and that is to look at cost efficiency, cost optimisation and cost management allowing the rest to take care of itself. In other words use cost per delivered kW or kWh as the next metric up from PUE that is meaningful and useful to the business.

The best part about cost per kW/kWh is that it doesn't require harmonisation in different countries, cost is cost and a kW is a unit of energy that is known and understood all over the world!