How to Achieve Lower PUE in Your Data Center

PUE or Power Usage Effectiveness indicates the ratio of a data center’s energy usage to the amount of energy consumed by the center’s IT equipment alone. The ideal Power Usage Effectiveness ratio is 1.0. This is due to the fact that a data center’s central objective is to provide IT resources for an organization or consumers. Ideally, all the energy used up by a data center goes towards the center’s IT equipment.

That would mean no energy is used in any other non-IT portion of the data center, including functions such as cooling/heating, lighting, security system, et cetera. Also, there is no energy lost in the power distribution network — in voltage conversion stages, uninterruptible power supplies, and cables. Such a situation requires 100 percent efficiency and hence, unattainable.

Know Your PUE

However, the definition of PUE itself leaves some gray areas. For instance, what if the data center has some onsite power generation infrastructure like solar panels installed? Is this power included in the calculation of the facility’s total energy consumption? There are questions about the inclusion of peripheral energy uses such as security and lighting in the calculation of PUE. However, experts maintain that to achieve a lower PUE, you have to know it.

Improving Your PUE

Once you are able to obtain accurate PUE measurements, you can work on improving it. Even if your company isn’t interested in the PUE, you can use this numerical data to improve efficiency in your data center. Here are some of the steps you can take to improve your PUE:

• A bigger temperature differential increases cooling efficiency. Isolate hot and cold air to maintain proper airflow within the data center.
• Automatically save cooling costs by raising the temperature.
• If the outside air is cool enough, use it to cool the facility and improve your PUE.
• Reduce power loss by using high-efficiency UPS systems to improve power distribution and eliminate unnecessary voltage conversion.
• Adopt controlled lighting technology. Turn off the lights when no one is in the facility. The servers don’t need light to function.

There is no better way of improving your PUE than measuring it. How else are you going to increase efficiency and improve PUE if you don’t have the exact figures? Collect data from various data center locations to come up with a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. With a CFD model, you can easily determine how much energy the data center is consuming and how to optimize it. EMR Associates can help you do it. Contact us online or call us at 615-828-8028 today to find out more.