Would you buy a car if you had no idea about its MPG rating? Especially with today’s volatile fuel prices, it seems like a crazy idea.
But that’s the situation in data centers today, because there’s no industry-wide standard for how to measure “useful work” in data centers. If we’re really going to get serious about energy use, the number one priority must be defining useful work for servers and, by extension, for data centers.
Call it Server MPG – a measure that helps data center managers make informed decisions as they prioritize their energy efficiency efforts.
Given the urgent discussions on data center energy issues, it seems like an obvious step to take. So when will developing a universally agreed upon Server MPG metric be taken seriously? To get it done, we need a number of groups to get together, including Green Grid, the British Computer Society, the European Union through its Code of Conduct for data centers, Uptime Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the EPA and others.
All these groups need to declare Server MPG the number one priority. The discussion needs to move beyond PUE and other metrics that can actually reward poor energy consumption decisions. We propose a data center efficiency measure based upon a proxy for useful work – CUPS or Compute Units Per Second. Initial discussions with server, storage, and networking OEMs shows a keen interest in this basic concept.
Server MPG doesn’t have to be an “exact” measure. A simple approximation that encourages the proper behavior is all we need. It should be something that can be published right at the IT device level, to help buyers make the right choices. And it should be readily scalable to the data center level.
How much work can this be? In the early 1960s, J. F. Kennedy boldly stated that we would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade – and we did it not once but several times. We even brought them home safely when all hope was lost.
Then why are we not able to get everyone together to agree on Server MPG within a few weeks? Okay, it might take six months of serious dedicated effort since they do not have the benefit of rocket scientists who can work miracles on short notice.
The industry and even the EPA have been quite vocal in lamenting the lack of and need for a definition of useful work in the data center. To paraphrase the classic ‘80s song - We want our Server MPG!
Jack Pouchet is director of energy initiatives for Emerson Network Power.
