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Data Center Standard Proposal Adds WEE To PUE

Posted by timothy on from the water-costs-something dept.

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.

42 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Summarize better when introducing new acronyms. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    WEE = water equivalent energy

    1. Re:Summarize better when introducing new acronyms. by nitehawk214 · · Score: 2

      The submittor knew that hardly anybody would know what these random acronyms would mean, and the editors simply don't give a shit. Standard slashdot. Well played.

      --
      I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
    2. Re:Summarize better when introducing new acronyms. by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      I was aware what WEE means, I was wondering what PUE means.

      Well, or so I thought. Now I noticed that WEE ain't what it used to be either...

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    3. Re:Summarize better when introducing new acronyms. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      TFA is just an excuse to put "WEE" and "PUE" in a headline. Otherwise, it is just stupid. Using evaporative cooling does not harm the environment, and is far better than using A/C powered by electricity from burning coal. To treat them as equivalent because they both involve "energy" is idiotic.

    4. Re:Summarize better when introducing new acronyms. by cheater512 · · Score: 1

      By that logic, energy doesn't harm the environment either because it can be from solar/wind/hydro/etc...
      Fresh water isn't infinite nor free.

      It makes a big deal if it is treated fit for human use water or grey water or from a lake/pond/river.
      Hopefully WEE takes that in to account.

    5. Re:Summarize better when introducing new acronyms. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      Fresh water isn't infinite nor free.

      The amount of fresh water used in evaporative cooling is insignificant. California uses 14 trillion gallons of water annually, or an average of 38 billion gallons per day. A data center with evaporative cooling will use far less than a millionth of that. Conservation is important, but having a lack of perspective is not helpful in addressing the problem.

    6. Re:Summarize better when introducing new acronyms. by judgecorp · · Score: 2

      Agreed. I wrote TFA and did the WEE-PUE headline for fun. You are also right - this is a sort of false accounting, designed to match wishful thinking by DX vendors and data center operators in unfavourable climates. Peter Judge

  2. save your pageclicks. by nimbius · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
    1. Re:save your pageclicks. by mjwx · · Score: 1

      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.

      In correct English, PUE is not pronounced Poo. The U sound is emphasised and the e is de-emphasised. It will sound closer to "pew" than "poo" in your simple parlance.

      Pronouncing the U sound as a double O is Spanish, not English.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
    2. Re: save your pageclicks. by tsqr · · Score: 1

      Due, flue, accrue, and sue beg to disagree.

    3. Re:save your pageclicks. by gstoddart · · Score: 2

      In correct English

      No such thing. English is an amalgamation of a bunch of languages.

      Glue rhymes with poo.

      Anybody who tries to give a universal rule for English is going to be wrong in several corner cases. As evidence, I offer this, or this.

      English is much less definable and explainable than people like to admit. Which is what makes it infinitely malleable and capable of doing things nobody thought of.

      I'm not convinced there is a single rule which says "in English you always ..." which is actually accurate in all cases. Because English borrows words from Latin, French, German, Spanish, Gaelic .. and every other language which we ever encountered.

      It's got more exceptions than most people will ever fully have a handle on. It's not that kind of language.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    4. Re: save your pageclicks. by Trogre · · Score: 1

      Well the latter three anyway...

      --
      "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
    5. Re:save your pageclicks. by Chas · · Score: 3, Funny

      English does not "borrow" from other languages.
      English corners other languages in dark alleys, hits them over the head, and then rifles through their pockets for loose grammar.

      --


      Chas - The one, the only.
      THANK GOD!!!
    6. Re:save your pageclicks. by judgecorp · · Score: 1

      I am that giggling intern, and have been for 20 years. Peter Judge

    7. Re:save your pageclicks. by judgecorp · · Score: 1

      To be fair, within the datacenter industry when people say "PUE" they pronounce it "pew" Probably to avoid saying "poo" Peter Judge

  3. Re:OMG WTF TLA by nitehawk214 · · Score: 1

    Certainly not timothy.

    --
    I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
  4. Here is an idea... by bobbied · · Score: 2

    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
    1. Re:Here is an idea... by buchner.johannes · · Score: 1

      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.

      And how do you measure sustainability costs? Buying price is not the true cost.

      --
      NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
    2. Re:Here is an idea... by bobbied · · Score: 1

      Total life cycle costs is what I said here.. Not the buying price of the facility, not just the monthly bills for things like electricity, water, maintenance, taxes, financing, and labor, but the cost over the WHOLE life of the project...

      Surely people in business have calculated all this long BEFORE they built the place... Because if they haven't, they are not very good at business. Two things you MUST do in business or you die... 1. Make enough profit and 2. Manage the cash flow. And PUE and WEE are not tools that manage these two things so they are worthless. (At least from the business point of view.) It's Dollars in verses dollars out and keeping those in balance well enough to make a return on the investment... Otherwise just buy T-Bills with the money and forget all this nonsense.

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    3. Re: Here is an idea... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      People, including those in business can be sloppy about their accounting, if you make enough profit on other things, you can have losses in other areas. Sometimes this is intentional, other times inadvertent.

    4. Re:Here is an idea... by tlambert · · Score: 1

      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.

      Well, given that no matter how you're measuring it, the fact that materials were mined, and refined, and processed, and transported, and all of this involved an expenditure of energy in the first place, you've irrecoverably contributed to the entropy of the universe.

      So I'm not sure what you are asking, unless it's that we account for all entropic costs for all human activity, including accounting for the accounting for the entropic costs. Which is, of course, an absurd standard to hold anyone to, since metabolic processes are, themselves, entropic.

      So, we are not asking whether people are or aren't entropy whores, we're merely haggling about the price, aren't we?

    5. Re:Here is an idea... by Junta · · Score: 1

      But PUE isn't that a good thing there either. It speaks to some overhead, but does not speak to how that power is sourced or how efficient it is put to use. A horribly inefficient processor that sucks down power can have really good PUE through a complex cooling system and in a region powered by coal, even if you can do the same work with a tenth of the power, but that part is not available in a design without a fan, and installed in a place where solar power provides a good chunk of the power. The more sustainable answer in that made hypothetical would be the fan cooled efficient processor getting a lot from solar, but PUE does not care about that.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    6. Re: Here is an idea... by Circlotron · · Score: 1

      I wish they could use the waste heat for desalination.

    7. Re:Here is an idea... by bobbied · · Score: 1

      For Pete's sake... I'm talking about ACCOUNTING here. What does it cost in dollars, or rubles, or bit coin to purchase, run and decommission the data center.... I'm saying that THAT is the only important measure of "efficiency" and that PUE and WEE are worthless to a business except for marketing. People who bow to this environmental impact stuff when making business decisions are not good at business. Where I'm all for being environmentally friendly when I can, in business Profit and Cash flow MUST be the primary concern.

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    8. Re:Here is an idea... by tlambert · · Score: 1

      For Pete's sake... I'm talking about ACCOUNTING here. What does it cost in dollars, or rubles, or bit coin to purchase, run and decommission the data center....

      Quit including "and decommission", and we can have a reasonable cost discussion. Otherwise, you are talking future value of materials used in the construction of the data center, and future costs of electronic recycling programs, and so on. And those can change drastically over a very few years.

      At issue is that a lot of the materials, particularly copper and rare earths, are commodity traded materials, and their value can fluctuate wildly as a result. As was seen by people breaking into buildings to rip out copper pipes. As we saw, when Sumitomo Corporation's Yasuo Hamanaka attempted to corner the copper market between 1986 and 1996, leading to a drastic ten year run up in copper prices. He eventually was in control of 5% of the entire copper market in the world.

      The only things that actually matter are "purchase" (sunk costs) and "run" (ongoing costs).

    9. Re:Here is an idea... by bobbied · · Score: 1

      So, if it's unknowable with any certainty you want to just ignore the costs? That's not a good idea..

      You simply have to at least think about decommissioning costs, if you are going to be responsible in your business plan. Sure, you can ignore these costs and just plan to go bankrupt and let your creditors and share holders clean up the mess but I don't feel that is ethical and just going out of business is generally not the desired situation.

      You keep dropping into the supply chain and talking about raw materials. That is totally irrelevant to the business we are discussing, unless you are suggesting that the business you are in is doing all of these things. If you are going to buy your servers from Dell or HP, all you need to know is how much the servers will cost you to buy, maintain, and get rid of when they are useless someday.

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    10. Re:Here is an idea... by tlambert · · Score: 1

      You simply have to at least think about decommissioning costs, if you are going to be responsible in your business plan.

      My plan is: "There is a net positive margin of about 6% between what I plan to sell the datacenter to the scrap dealer, and what the scrap deal will make on it, considering only net present value". Therefore, my decommissioning costs are fixed, and give me a net positive income, and the scrap company also gets a net positive income.

      Sure, you can ignore these costs and just plan to go bankrupt and let your creditors and share holders clean up the mess but I don't feel that is ethical and just going out of business is generally not the desired situation.

      Don't be an idiot; if that were my plan, I'd just put the thing in a holding company in the first place, spin it off at the last minute, and let the holding company go bankrupt. That way I'd have clean hands. That assumes that the data center contents at decommission time have zero value.

      I deny that the data center contents at decommission time would have zero value.

      You keep dropping into the supply chain and talking about raw materials. That is totally irrelevant to the business we are discussing, unless you are suggesting that the business you are in is doing all of these things. If you are going to buy your servers from Dell or HP, all you need to know is how much the servers will cost you to buy, maintain, and get rid of when they are useless someday.

      Google does not buy their servers from Dell. Google builds their own motherboards.

      So yes, the business I am in *IS* doing all those things.

      In addition, when it comes to cloud computing, one of the ways that old school hardware companies are monetizing the hardware that no one is buying from them, is to put them into a data center, and sell cloud hosting services on top of it. This is, in fact, one of IBM's big cloud strategy components.

      So once again, yes, the business I am in *IS* doing all those things.

      I know of very few companies engaged in building out large data centers, which are also stupid enough to let someone else do the work for them.

    11. Re:Here is an idea... by bobbied · · Score: 1

      Google may indeed be engineering their own systems, but THEY don't build them, they have that done. They also don't build the components that go into the systems, they buy this stuff already made. Further they don't go out and produce the raw materials that go into the components that they are stuffing into the custom designed motherboards....

      But that doesn't change what I'm saying... There is a specific cost involved in setting up a data center. Then it costs you money to operate the thing, plus it costs you to get rid of it. All these costs must be less than what you can make running the data center or the whole thing is not worth considering as a business... But even more, you must have a cash flow structure that allows you to pay the bills as they come in as well, which is where MOST businesses started by non-business folks fail...

      It's a total lifecycle cost and cash flow question and if you don't have a plan that gets you a profit and cash flow necessary it doesn't matter. PUE and WEE have zero bearing on cash flow or profit and as I've been arguing, have nothing to do with the business side of a datacenter...

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    12. Re:Here is an idea... by tlambert · · Score: 1

      But that doesn't change what I'm saying... There is a specific cost involved in setting up a data center. Then it costs you money to operate the thing, plus it costs you to get rid of it.

      NO.

      It *does NOT* cost me to get rid of it.

      I *MAKE* money when I get rid of a data center, because I *RECOVER* some of my sunk costs. People will happily pay me for my electronic components and materials that they are able to recover post recycling. My real estate has increased in value. The capitol improvements I made to the property still have value.

      Why do you *insist* that I am not recovering any of my sunk costs when I get rid of a data center?!?!? These damn things are not like nuclear superfund cleanup sites; they contain *valuable* raw materials, even ignoring all other value to the location, such as its *demonstrated* access to large amounts of electrical power from multiple sources, and so on.

      The idea that it costs me a *DAMN* thing to decommission a data center is ignorant, misguided, and indicates that you are looking at an opportunity as if it were a problem.

  5. Water cost is regional ... by TheGavster · · Score: 1

    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".
  6. for a native Brit, headline is hilarious by ihtoit · · Score: 2

    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
    1. Re:for a native Brit, headline is hilarious by gstoddart · · Score: 1

      Potty humor is fairly universal in the English language. We got it.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  7. Google does it differently by tlambert · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Google does it differently by gstoddart · · Score: 1

      Salt water is hella corrosive. It's really not about potable water, it's about water which wants to eat through most anything.

      Now, I have no idea what Google has salt water contained in, but having lived in coastal areas and visited coastal areas ... salt water pretty much eats everything near it even if it isn't in direct contact.

      Pretty much most metal in contact with salt water is either going to need to get replaced often, have a sacrificial anode thingy, or be fairly constantly maintained and painted.

      Plastics might fare better, but metal faces huge issues near salt water.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re:Google does it differently by tlambert · · Score: 1

      Salt water is hella corrosive. It's really not about potable water, it's about water which wants to eat through most anything.

      Now, I have no idea what Google has salt water contained in, but having lived in coastal areas and visited coastal areas ... salt water pretty much eats everything near it even if it isn't in direct contact.

      You don't need to pump it inside, and you don't need to pump it through anything but PVC. In other words, all you have to do is get it from the cold spot in the ocean to the heat exchangers, and then back out into the ocean.

      Here's the video that tells what they did in 2011: http://www.tomshardware.com/ne...

    3. Re:Google does it differently by judgecorp · · Score: 1

      Yes -- Google took over an old paper mill in Finland, and adopted a system that uses seawater for secondary cooling. http://www.datacenterdynamics....

  8. Evaporative cooling by rossdee · · Score: 1

    Evaporative cooling doesn't work where or when it is humid.

    Here in the summer its mostly humid.
     

  9. /r/shitpost by istartedi · · Score: 1

    /r/shitpost

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  10. PUE unfairness by Swoopy · · Score: 1

    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.

  11. Yes, I too must be infantile by sabbede · · Score: 1

    Because those are funny names!

  12. Re:Sloppy Units by petermgreen · · Score: 1

    Given a defined time period, average power and total energy are for the most part two different ways of measuring the same quantity.

    "IT equipment energy" is the energy delivered to the IT equipment (It equipment doesn't "provide" energy). PUE is a measure of the energy efficiency of the facility, NOT of the efficiency of the IT equipment hosted within that facility. A PUE of 1 means that all the energy going into the datacenter is delivered to the IT equipment. A PUE of 2 means half the energy delivered goes to IT equipment and half goes to other things (coolng, power distribution losses, UPS losses)..

    You can calculate PUE over any time period but for an overall figure you would normally want to calculate it over a year (or a whole number of years) as there will likely be substantial seasonal variations.

    If you host the same IT equipment in a low PUE datacenter and a high PUE datacenter then the equipment in the high PUE datacenter will result in greater power consumption from the grid than in the low PUE datacenter. HAving said that of course inefficient IT equipment hosted in a low PUE datacenter can still be worse overall than efficient IT equipement hosted in a high PUE datacenter.

    --
    note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
  13. Can someone explain this bit? by geminidomino · · Score: 1

    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?