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Data Center Standard Proposal Adds WEE To PUE
judgecorp writes: A proposed revision to the data center efficiency standard will delight the infantile by adding WEE to PUE. Seriously, PUE is widely used to compare data center efficiency, but critics say it is unfairly biased to sites in the Northern Hemisphere which can use evaporative cooling, and ignores the environmental impact of water use by data centers. Simply adding the evaporative energy of water to a measure based on electrical energy will face a lot of opposition however — on various grounds including science and marketing.
WEE = water equivalent energy
Who gives a shit?
PUE (power usage effectiveness)
WEE (water equivalent energy)
and somewhere at datacenter dynamics magazine theres a giggling intern that needs to be shown the door.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I read this as WEE and POO!
Compare them using the REAL metric, total life cycle costs...How much does it cost to buy, operate and dismantle your data center when it's usefulness is over... That's the REAL question.
The rest of this PUE and WEE stuff is just window dressing and doesn't matter to ANY business beyond the PR value of claiming to be "green" or some such nonsense. If you want to be "green" slap up a solar panel farm or a windmill, or contract with your local power company for a % of renewable sourced electric power. Just call the cost what it really is, Public Relations and Advertisement.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The article is proposing taking water into account for data centers that use evaporative cooling, since not all places can use that technique:
Some data centers in China and India pay a high price for water,” said Stephen Worn, managing director North America at DatacenterDynamics. “Some of them need to run desalination plans,” Other countries have a humid atmosphere, which makes evaporative cooling much less useful.
That's absurd, a thin ploy for making good data centers look bad because the not-so-good ones want to look better. By the same logic, we should add a "temperature penalty" for data centers in cold climates.
Water use certainly is an environmental impact factor ... if the data center is located somewhere where water is scarce. If the metric doesn't take into account where the center is located when evaluating externalities, then it's not really doing its job. Sure, blowing through millions of gallons a month is a problem in California, but in upstate New York it's not really an issue.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
So the guy who wrote the report works for a company that sells data center cooling solutions. Why am I not surprised that he wants to make evaporative cooling look bad?
Don't worry most of them will be canned and replaced by H1-Bs when Dice sells off this site. Hope the clerks at the unemployment office troll them too. Fuck 'em.
I don't know if you Yanks get it, but yeah, I laughed until I squirted milk out my nose.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
You insensitive clod! I'm neither a coprophile nor am I interested in watersports. I especially am not interested in mixing the two.
So many negative comments. I'd bet anyone a dollar that more than half of you giggled when you read the headline - even the ones that chose to gripe about it being puerile and childish. To them I say 'Get over yourselves'
Water use certainly is an environmental impact factor ... if the data center is located somewhere where water is scarce. If the metric doesn't take into account where the center is located when evaluating externalities, then it's not really doing its job. Sure, blowing through millions of gallons a month is a problem in California, but in upstate New York it's not really an issue.
Google just turns the thermostat up to 80, and has its data center techs wear shorts and Hawaiian shirts. The equipment doesn't fail any faster.
Also, I was totally stymied by the supposed need for desalination, given that Google happily uses salt water in the cooling systems in several of its data centers; it's not like the computers care that the water be potable.
Finally, I agree that some places need desalination plants -- it's just: those places are not data centers, they're agricultural areas. For example, there's 80 billion gallons of water flooding 600,000 acres of laser-leveled rice paddys to a depth of 5 inches for growing rice in Sacramento Valley alone; in addition, it takes another 4 billion gallons each day to replace losses due to evaporation. China has similar issues, due to rice being a staple grain there, as well. It's not for the data centers.
At least the wikipedia version:
"Power Usage Effectiveness" = "Total Facility Energy" / "IT Equipment Energy"
I realize that being dimensionless, time factors out and doesn't really matter, but it's kinda sloppy to describe a power constant in terms of energy (I assume you integrate the power over the lifetime of the equipment..?). And how does "IT Equipment Energy" map to something useful? Is it just the energy the IT equipment provides?
Evaporative cooling doesn't work where or when it is humid.
Here in the summer its mostly humid.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
thanks i know its called a pew reseach poll or (church poll)
some of us are sick of trying k,thx,bye.
Actually PUE as a metric for comparison favours longer established datacentres too, compared to potentially better designed more efficient ones that have just been built. So it's a bit of a "perverse" metric.
A room already filled up to capacity with IT equipment will score well on PUE because cooling, consumption etc will be balanced and close to it's design capacity, whereas a room that has just opened and has only begun to be filled up, will have power distribution and cooling equipment designed to deliver well in excess of what's being consumed, making it harder to get a good PUE score for year 1. Power and cooling equipment always has a design optimum and hardly ever scales linearly with what's being required of it. Compartimentalised (cold/warm aisle) data centre layouts make up for that a little bit, but make the data centre overall appear more expensive from a price per square foot / rackspace perspective.
I think they have a different view on the price of water. :)
Or they will when the last of it is gone.
Because those are funny names!
I could completely understand where this is coming from if it were the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive.
Apparently, it's not.
critics say it is unfairly biased to sites in the Northern Hemisphere which can use evaporative cooling
Does water evaporate backwards in the southern hemisphere, or something?