Have you been throwing the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) acronym around in conversations lately? Be honest, do you even know what it is? Evidently, many in the Web hosting industry don’t quite know if asking a few people on live chat is any indication, that is.
PUE is basically how much power you use to run your equipment in a data center. It's a simple enough calculation: divide the amount of power entering a data center by the power used to run the computer equipment in it. It's probably a lot of work for the data center operators but it's a good figure to know.
Why?
Well, in our interview with EvoSwitch's Laurens Rosenthal, it's the only figure you need to measure the success of a green data center. Microsoft and Google have been puffing out their chests and throwing their PUE figures around, so it must be important. A TreeHugger article notes that Microsoft is at 1.22, while Google is marginally better at 1.21, with 1 being perfect. The article maintains that 2 is the industry standard at present.
It's going to be tough to attain those standards for everyone else, but if you run your data center with less power, that's less carbon emissions and less operating expenses. That's good news for consumers we hope. With Obama focused on the green path and green-collar jobs and the fact that data centers are one of the fastest growing segments in the power consumption market, standards will be monitored, discussed and evaluated. That's not so bad really. All things equal (prices, customer service, reliability), if you require colocation services or more data center space, what's wrong with saying: I like what you have to offer but tell me about your PUE.
Is Go Daddy Saying Go Big or Go Home?
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