IT must look beyond PUE: Ovum

MELBOURNE: IT departments must build a business case for greater data centre efficiency measurement if they are to bring escalating costs under control, according to research firm Ovum.

In a new report, the company claims that most organisations do not adequately measure resource use in their data centres and consequently are unable to effectively tackle rising costs, said a press release.

Also read: Data centre space requirements to shrink

It states that IT decision-makers must build a business case and drive the message home to senior management to gain support for investment in a multi-faceted efficiency measurement strategy, the release added.

Rhonda Ascierto, Ovum senior analyst and author of the report, said, “Despite the fact that data centres are inefficient money pits, most organisations are not measuring inefficiencies or resource use.”

He added that disparate IT systems and a lack of information sharing among different site teams have fuelled the attitude that data efficiency measurement is too difficult and expensive to implement. This means a massive opportunity is being missed to reduce the vast resources that data centres swallow up.

“To overcome these challenges, IT decision-makers need to create a business case around data centre measurement in order to drive the message up to the very top of the business.” Ascierto further added.

According to the report, using the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric alone is not an adequate measurement strategy and will not lead to significant cost savings and resource efficiencies.

Instead, organisations should be implementing PUE in addition to several new metrics released by The Green Grid, the industry-led not-for-profit organisation that created PUE.

These include Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) and several data productivity proxies, as well as the new Data Centre Maturity Model, a blueprint for efficiency and sustainability measurement for data centers.