Sentilla Blog

It is not always clear what the right way is to measure the success of your data center's energy strategy.  While many would promote PUE as the right way to go, it does not tell the full story.  Think about these examples:

• A data center is commissioned, but no IT equipment is installed.  The PUE is infinitely high, but it doesn't mean the data center is inefficient.  As IT equipment is added, the PUE drops but the data center's efficiency did not improve.
• As servers and storage are consolidated or virtualized, the overall power consumption of the data center decreases.  Not only is there a reduction in the IT power, but a smaller corresponding reduction in the cooling required.  While the net is a win (more power capacity and less power usage), PUE typically increases.

These aren't the only bad examples of PUE, but they illustrate the fact that it is simply a ratio and it must be understood when talking about it. 

Today, Sentilla announced version 3.0 of Sentilla Energy Manager.  My role at Sentilla is varied, but one of my responsibilities is creating and managing the product roadmap.  With version 3.0, I'm really excited about how much we've added into this release.  SEM 3.0 is truly revolutionary, providing a ton of features and functionality that no other vendor provides.  It is built on our Sentilla Software Platform, which is in its 4th generation, is very robust, and has served as the basis of all of our products since 2006.

At AFCOM's Data Center World in Nashville, I presented "Why PUE is not enough: How to measure TRUE success in the data center".  In this talk, I discuss a number of different metrics that merge IT performance with consumed resources (energy, cooling, and space). Also considered is how to carefully choose metrics, so that you use the right metrics to gauge your performance and progress, whether in application performance, IT utilization, energy footprint, or available capacity.  I really enjoyed the talk and had a great interactive audience (sorry that you can't always hear the audience questions in the recording).  I look forward to being invited back to present follow on educational sessions at future AFCOM conferences (such as DCW in October in Las Vegas).  I had a fun time putting together this particular talk, which is different in a number of ways than the talks I gave earlier this year at Data Centre World in London, and the GSMI Green Data Center Conference in San Diego.

If you have any questions or feedback on the talk, please leave them in the comments.  And to Google and Facebook, I really wasn't trying to pick on you!