Whitepaper explores IT & data centre metrics

The large-scale data centres of cloud and colocation providers require amounts of energy in the double-digit megawatt range. The total number of data centres around the world worldwide is responsible for a growing share of global CO2 emissions. Thus the GeSI (Global e-Sustainability Initiative) predicts that IT's share of worldwide CO2 emissions will rise from 1.3% (in 2002) to 2.3% in 2020.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not only a political and social task, but it is accompanied by making savings in electricity costs and is therefore of growing importance for every data centre operator – whatever their scale of operations.

In an increasingly competitive environment, data centres that are efficiently and – as part of a "Green IT Policy" – can be an important advantage, as the examples of Google and Apple are demonstrating.

To evaluate the efficiency of data centres, there is a whole series of metrics that permit no only the evaluation of energy use and CO2 emission but also the sustainable use of water. Furthermore, metrics can be also employed to compare individual components and activities and thus the solutions offered by a variety of suppliers.

This whitepaper provides an overview of the most important metrics for the IT infrastructures of data centres. In the process, it becomes evident that individual metrics alone are not conclusive enough, but that data centre operators need to define an appropriate set of different parameters that are tailored for their particular applications.

The continuous recording of the relevant data and its transparent visualisation in the form of trend analyses makes it possible to operate data centres efficiently and sustainably. This way, improvements over the same months of the previous year can be displayed, while sources of variations from the target values can be sought.