The Green Grid is a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency and sustainable practices in data centers and IT environments. The Green Grid develops standards, metrics, and best practices to improve resource efficiency in data centers, promoting environmentally responsible and economically viable data center operations.
Key Objectives of The Green Grid
The aim of The Green Grid is to promote:
- Standardization. The Green Grid develops and promotes globally recognized metrics, such as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), Data Center Maturity Model (DCMM), and other efficiency metrics.
- Best practices. They provide guidelines and tools for data center operators to optimize energy use and reduce environmental impact.
- Collaboration. The consortium facilitates collaboration among industry stakeholders, including data center operators and vendors, to share knowledge and drive innovation.
- Education and training. The Green Grid offers educational resources, workshops, and training programs to build expertise in sustainable data center practices.
Popular Metrics Developed by The Green Grid
The Green Grid has developed many widely adopted data center KPIs to track data center efficiency and sustainability. Some of their most popular metrics include:
- Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). Measures overall data center energy efficiency by indicating how much energy is consumed by IT equipment compared to supporting infrastructure.
- Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE). Evaluates a data center’s carbon footprint by comparing carbon emissions to energy consumed by IT equipment.
- Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE). Tracks the efficiency of a data center’s water usage by comparing water consumption to energy consumed by IT equipment.
- Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCIE). Measures overall data center energy efficiency by indicating the proportion of total energy consumed that is used by IT equipment.
- Energy Reuse Effectiveness (ERE). Assesses the effectiveness of a data center in reusing energy that would otherwise be wasted by measuring the energy reused outside the data center compared to the energy consumed by IT equipment.
- Data Center Compute Efficiency (DCCE). Measures the computational output of a data center relative to the energy consumed by IT equipment, providing insight into the productivity and efficiency of the data center’s computing resources.
- Space Usage Effectiveness (SpUE). Tracks the efficiency of space utilization within a data center by comparing the amount of space used by IT equipment to the total available space, aiming to optimize the physical footprint of the data center.
Track PUE and Meet Sustainability Goals with DCIM Software
In addition to following The Green Grid’s best practices, deploying Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software can potentially help improve the efficiency of your data center.
Modern DCIM software eliminates manual PUE math and enables real-time, automatic PUE calculations for each of your sites. PUE trend charts allow you to easily observe the impact of energy efficiency initiatives, and other out-of-the-box energy charts and reports provide actionable insights that make it easy to track progress, identify trends, and benchmark against industry standards.
DCIM software can also automatically collect live measured readings from intelligent rack PDUs and other key points in the power circuit to enable smarter decisions that reduce energy consumption. Leveraging this data allows for more informed capacity planning that maximizes utilization of existing facilities, reduces resource waste, and defers energy-intensive expansions.
Patented electronic ASHRAE psychrometric charts visualize the temperature and humidity of each rack, helping you avoid overcooling and reduce cooling costs. A built-in report identifies potential ghost servers wasting energy by sitting idle, allowing you to investigate and potentially decommission them. Energy reports by data center or customer help you identify power hogs, compare efficiencies, and drive more efficient behavior. Plus, you can integrate DCIM with VMware to map virtual machines to their physical hosts and move those instances to the most efficient servers.
Want to see how Sunbird DCIM helps you automatically calculate PUE and increase energy efficiency? Get your free test drive now!