http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/08/14/will-the-epa-report-be-a-catalyst/ News and analysis about data centers, cloud computing, managed hosting and disaster recovery Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:24:17 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/08/14/will-the-epa-report-be-a-catalyst/comment-page-1/#comment-148 Eric Gallant Thu, 16 Aug 2007 15:20:17 +0000 http://dev.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/08/14/will-the-epa-report-be-a-catalyst/#comment-148 I have a suggestion. This idea put forward by the EPA report and the Green Grid position paper that the power consumption of the entire building is a meaningful metric for data center efficiency is just silly. Maybe if your entire building is data center such a metric may have some usefulness. But what percentage of all data centers is like this? Even enterprise class data centers are only maybe 60% raised floor or less. I can measure the power consumption of only the data center portion of any facility fairly easily. Best practices already dictate that Data Center loads have a dedicated electrical distribution path. This distribution path can be metered. Why would I take into consideration the whole facility? Why doesn't the EPA focus their efforts on developing a meaningful measurement of the computing and storage capacity of a data center? (Computing capacity)+(Storage capacity)/(Data center power consumption)= Data Center Efficiency. I have a suggestion. This idea put forward by the EPA report and the Green Grid position paper that the power consumption of the entire building is a meaningful metric for data center efficiency is just silly. Maybe if your entire building is data center such a metric may have some usefulness. But what percentage of all data centers is like this? Even enterprise class data centers are only maybe 60% raised floor or less.
I can measure the power consumption of only the data center portion of any facility fairly easily. Best practices already dictate that Data Center loads have a dedicated electrical distribution path. This distribution path can be metered. Why would I take into consideration the whole facility?
Why doesn’t the EPA focus their efforts on developing a meaningful measurement of the computing and storage capacity of a data center? (Computing capacity)+(Storage capacity)/(Data center power consumption)= Data Center Efficiency.

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