On the surface this may seem like a fairly straightforward question, but the reality is that data center energy efficiency is rather elusive. While many people discuss it on a regular basis, very few seem to hit the nail on the head. A reason for this is that many in the industry tend to focus on PUE as a genuine indicator of data center energy efficiency, when it really isn’t. It’s merely just a proxy.

So if not PUE, what should we be looking at? Where is the focus? Is data center energy efficiency about the building or is it more than that? In short, we must think about data centers in their entirety. Indeed, data centers are a service that are being hosted within a building, but a data center is not just the building alone. If you have no IT load in the building, the building doesn’t consume any energy. The building merely puts a slight overhead on the energy consumed by the IT load, and that is effectively what PUE measures.

So how do we actually achieve genuine energy efficiency? Well if what we’re saying is true, that the data center is a service and not just a building, then the important focus is the IT load (the building is simply putting something of an overhead on the delivery of that IT load). Surely then, we should be focusing on the IT side of things including the services, the compute, the storage, the network, and very importantly, the software that runs in our data centers.

For more on this topic and what it means in terms of data center energy efficiency and sustainability, check out our recent webinar titled, Data Center Energy Efficiency and Sustainability: Examining the Key Elements and Planning for a Path Forward.