Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency

Considering Data Center power consumption as a criterion has become important in recent years with the increase in energy prices. In total, data center efficiency is determined by the ratio of the “computing used” performance to the total power consumed for the data center. The “computing used” capacity will be in “mips” (the number of instructions a processor processes per second), and the total power will be in Watt units.

This total efficiency consists of two parts. The first describes the hardware technology used and is the ratio of the “computing used” capacity to the power consumed by the IT (IT) hardware. Strategies such as more efficient server use or virtualization increase this efficiency.

The second component is defined as the ratio of the power consumed by the IT (IT) hardware (UPS output power) to the total power consumed in the data center. This ratio, “DCIE” (Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency), is the data center infrastructure efficiency. The inverse of this value, “PUE” (Power Usage Effectiveness), defines the power usage effectiveness.

The physical infrastructure efficiency of a data center is related to many inefficiency factors as shown in the figure below. One group of these factors includes the inefficiencies of the systems on the active power line, while others include the power consumption of systems such as cooling, lighting, fire systems, security and automation.