You would think this is easy to figure out right?

But, how come I only see major enterprises promoting their PUE? I mean we always see PUE (and it’s inverse cousin DCiE) being compared to MPG in green presentations – and every car manufacturer and individual seems to have an appreciation and understanding of MPG – so where are all the enterprise when it comes to understanding their PUE?

Check Grid Grid for the definition and we’ve got the cool chart on the left and it looks pretty simple. Just get your numbers and do the math!!! I mean the math is simple right?

Oh… Now I see where the problem lies… getting the numbers?

From the Metrics and Measurements page you can get a quick definition or rather purpose of PUE:

The Green Grid proposed the use of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and its reciprocal, Data Center Efficiency (DCE) metrics, which enable data center operators to quickly estimate the energy efficiency of their data centers, compare the results against other data centers, and determine if any energy efficiency improvements need to be made.

If I dust off my old Electrical Engineering books:

Power = Voltage x Current

Wow – this simple right? Nope. For a lot of data centers – there still remains a lot of mystery surrounding power visibility and consumption. How do you measure and how do you aggregate across all the different data center assets (and across different vendors, console, meters etc) so you can get a picture of what the heck is going on. Don’t get me wrong – if you have a state of the art, one vendor solution – you might some luxuries that most enterprise data centers don’t – but for the average data center environment – it’s probably a big challenge. What’s happening at the rack or circuit level still remains a buried treasure. If you’re reading this and you agree – drop me a comment. Validation is a good thing!

Confession. I use Twitter. How shocking in this day of social media! My user name is PUE_DCiE. You can check me out at http://twitter.com/PUE_DCiE. I though it would be good to share just what that user name was geared towards. Thanks Green Grid for creating this definition! Now I have a cool user name.