A new set of IT-centric efficiency metrics for the data center industry, proposed by iTRACS.
Since its introduction by the Green Grid several years ago, Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) has been an extremely valuable facilities-centric metric, acting as a guidepost for measuring the percentage of energy going to facilities assets (cooling, etc.) vs. the amount of energy going to IT assets (servers, etc.).
PUE tells an important part of the efficiency story related to facilities. But now that our industry has embraced PUE, it’s time to focus on the other side of the house – the IT side.
iTRACS recommends augmenting PUE with an additional set of new IT-centric metrics. Here are two reasons why:
- PUE is a facilities-centric metric. PUE measures the energy usage of facilities equipment vs. IT equipment. Many large-scale facilities improvements in cooling and energy have already been made. Others are being made outside of the purview of PUE, such as the use of clean energy sources like wind, solar, etc. These are impressive improvements, but they do not reflect what is happening on the IT side of the house.
- PUE is disconnected from the business output generated by the data center. PUE does not reflect the business value of the data center investment. Business output and business value emanate from the IT side of the house, so PUE is not addressing efficiency at the source – the IT assets driving the business. PUE doesn’t take into consideration the cost of the full IT load or how to optimize that load.
iTRACS recommends augmenting PUE with a new set of IT-centric efficiency metrics: DCIM Business Output™.
DCIM Business Output™ focuses on the IT side of the house.
iTRACS is helping some of the world’s largest and most complex data centers optimize the agility, efficiency, and availability of their physical infrastructure. And our customers are consistently telling us they need a way to measure and compare the efficiency of their IT assets throughout the stack.
The bottom line? Decision-makers around the world are seeking to capture not just energy efficiency, but something more elusive – the efficiency with which IT delivers value to the business.
Indeed, there is a groundswell today around the pursuit of a new approach to efficiency. As Wired.com recently wrote, “What’s the best way to measure the efficiency of a data center? No one really knows. But there’s no shortage of IT minds trying to figure it out.“
DCIM Business Output™ is iTRACS’ response to the challenge.
DCIM Business Output™ attempts to measure the ratio between business output delivered by IT assets and the energy/cost required to deliver it: business value achieved vs. the energy/cost to achieve it.
In other words – what are the specific business results generated by IT infrastructure and what is the energy/cost required to generate those results?
Below are two potential metrics within this approach, utilizing energy as the primary cost factor.
Asset Efficiency metric. This compares CPU utilization vs. power usage at the individual device level, creating an opportunity to conduct asset-to-asset comparisons to determine which asset is delivering business value at the highest efficiency. |
Asset vs. Asset. In this example of the Asset Efficiency metric, Server B, which has the potential to deliver higher business output, is actually running less efficiently than Server A. This is a problem for both the business and the planet. |
IT Efficiency metric. This is the “PUE of IT” and is meant to build on the industry’s growing understanding and usage of PUE. Just as PUE measures the ratio of facilities to IT, this proposed new metric would help determine how much energy is going into IT assets that work directly for the business (servers, etc.) vs. IT assets that support this work but do not contribute directly to it (storage, switches, etc.). The goal is to minimize the amount of energy consumed by assets that aren’t directly producing work for the business so you can put more energy into assets that ARE working directly for the business. |
A step in a new direction.
So what’s been the response so far to the concept of DCIM Business Output™?
The customers, analysts, and industry pundits we’ve shared this with so far like it and are intrigued by it. They like how flexible the approach is.
For example, the “business output” used in the metrics can be whatever each data center owner or operator wants it to be, depending on the organization’s business model. An e-commerce company might measure “business output” as transactions per second or customer revenue per minute. A social media company may look at ad revenue or the number of social transactions. A cloud provider might look at services delivered or “compute power” charged to customers.
In this way, DCIM Business Output™ is not a competitive benchmark like PUE where specific numbers are targeted. It’s a comparative measurement where your organization evaluates its own step-by-step improvements in energy efficiency – and gains another perspective into the business value of your IT investment.
DCIM Business Output™ is by no means offered as a definitive metric. We offer it as a step in a new direction. As iTRACS VP of Converged Solutions Dan Fry wrote in his latest Myth Vs. Reality article for Computer Technology Review, “The journey is an iterative one.”
