Power Usage Effectiveness Is Just One Factor

from the more-data dept

Clearly businesses can't be judged by a single number. Would you judge a company solely based on its revenues? Its profit? Its market cap? Of course not! So hopefully we can agree that the popularity of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) as a complete performance indicator for data centers is meaningless without context. Every IT organization should develop its own tailored metrics to determine what is effective. There is no magic bullet for optimizing performance, folks.

With energy savings pretty high on the priorities list for most data center managers, though, you can't really blame marketers for pushing a simple, single number to try to make things sound like an easy fix. But as Albert Einstein once said, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." So of course PUE should be a factor that's included in evaluating IT performance. But so should things like: application performance, SLA adherence, profitability, operating expenses, and efficiency in terms of performance per Watt consumed.

So there's no easy answer, other than developing a set of metrics that work for your environment. And that will require on-going testing -- not a "set it and forget it" attitude that only gets checked once a year. Prioritize your metrics and optimize based on the data you obtain... and there's a growing amount of management software that will help with these endeavors.