Uptime chief: Dont believe the PUE hype [Video]

PUE, originally developed by the Uptime Institute and later promoted by The Green Grid, compares how much power your entire datacenter is using — including servers, CRAC systems, and systems — to how much of that energy is going toward computing tasks. A lower PUE means a datacenter is operating more efficiently, as the facility is wringing more performance per watt. “A PUE of 2.0 would mean that for every two watts at the meter, only one watt gets to the IT hardware,” Brill explains in his article.

Although measuring PUE can be useful for performing “a meaningful health check-up on your datacenter’s power and cooling energy efficiency,” Brill says, company’s claims to extremely low scores should be regarded with some healthy skepticism.

One of the problems with PUE, Brill argues, is that it currently looks only at electricity. ” Electricity is only one of a number of data center …