By Rajesh Nair, Founder and CTO
My car shows its performance in Miles Per Gallon; not in kilo joules/gallon or number of passengers per gallon. The only factor that I am interested in the average distance the car can travel with a unit of fuel. Depending on the type of fuel used I can even calculate distance per dollar as the unit of throughput. Here the efficiencies of all the systems in the car, such as engine, transmission, a/c, lighting, are aggregated to calculate the overall efficiency. So MPG is equivalent to “work performed” for unit energy consumed.
In a data center the “work performed” is the volume of data transferred, stored, routed or computed. So Volume of Data per Unit Power shows the throughput of a data center. This efficiency index includes efficiencies of all systems in the data center such as IT, cooling and power. PUE and DCIE only show the efficiency of cooling a data center and do not include efficiency of computing. Can Giga Bytes of data handled per Watts be the new unit of data center efficiency?
The telecommunications industry defined a similar approach a few years back to compare the operating efficiencies of communications equipment through ATIS’s Telecommunication Energy Efficiency Ratio (TEER) as a measure of network-element efficiency. This effort attempts to provide a comprehensive methodology for measuring and reporting energy consumption and uniformly quantifying a network component’s ratio of “work performed” to energy consumed. Though the TEER index is for telecom equipment, this can be easily adopted for different IT equipment and even for data centers.
Energy used by a packet of data in a data center shows its efficiency. Efficient data centers lead to Greener Data. |
