Green Grid: 2011 and beyond

Over the past year, The Green Grid has continued to work towards its mission to empower organisations such as government departments and local authorities in improving the efficiency of their data centres.  

 

Historically, our focus has been solely on the energy efficiency of the data centre. In 2011, we reset and enhanced our focus to the broader environmental sustainability of data centres. 

 

At our annual Technical Forum and Members Meeting in March this year, The Green Grid launched a range of new tools and resources designed to make it easier for operators to optimise their facilities.  These tools bolster the library of resources that have been created over the past three years and have been widely adopted by data centre operators across the globe.  

 

A key recent milestone for us has been the widespread adoption of our Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric, which was established by a cross-regional global task force, as the recommended metric for consistently determining energy efficiency in data centre facilities. 

 

We are now part of an ongoing collaborative effort, known as “Harmonising Global Metrics for Data Centre Energy Efficiency,” focused on improving data centre energy efficiency and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission efficiencies across the globe.  Other participating organisations include the U.S. Department of Energy’s Save Energy Now and Federal Energy Management Programs, US Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR Program, European Commission Joint Research Centre Data Centres Code of Conduct, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Japan’s Green IT Promotion Council.

 

The task force will continue to collaborate in the years ahead to ensure that data centre resource efficiency and productivity is delivered as consistently as possible across regions. That means data centre operators in the public sector across Europe, the US and Japan can move forward confident in the knowledge they have a consistent way to calculate and communicate their energy efficiency.

To deliver our expanded work towards environmental sustainability, earlier this year we launched several new metrics to complement and build on PUE. These include Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), designed to help data centre operators assess how efficiently these two key resources are managed.  We have also released Energy Reuse Effectiveness (ERE), which is a metric for measuring the benefit of reusing energy released from a data centre. This provides operators with greater visibility into opportunities for recovering energy from facilities, such as using the waste heat from a local authority data centre to help warm a neighbouring public swimming pool.   

 

The Green Grid has also recently widened their focus to start to look at the IT which sits in the data centre.  Sustainability, facilities and IT are all covered in another landmark tool recently created by The Green Grid which is the ‘Data Centre Maturity Model’ (DCMM).  The DCMM helps end users outline and understand the journey and opportunities for improving the energy efficiency and sustainability of their data centre and everything that sits inside it. 

 

In the model, all aspects of the data centre (including power, cooling, compute, storage and network) are assessed and are plotted along a continuum of levels from zero (“Minimal”) to five (“Visionary”).  The DCMM outlines the different opportunities to improve energy efficiency and sustainability within the data center and provides a five-year roadmap for the industry. Each level of the model has been developed by drawing on the collective experience of a Green Grid task force with unrivalled global experience and expertise.

 

Within the DCMM, the levels initially chart progress of a data centre with no efficiency improvement measures in place, through to level two which is current best practices and three to five which represent  future capabilities that all data centres should be aiming for. We hope to see public sector data centres match or lead those in the private sector by assessing and moving their existing data centres through the levels of the maturity model and aim for the higher levels of the model as part of new designs and sites.

 

The DCMM looks at numerous elements of the data centre, including: energy efficiency, energy demand, energy supply, utilisation of assets, as well as different issues relating to sustainability (e.g. water, waste heat, materials management, waste). By assessing their data centres, operators can benchmark their facilities using the Data Center Maturity Model Equalizer to determine their level of maturity and identify ongoing steps required to achieve improved efficiency and sustainability.  

 

The Data Center Maturity Model Equalizer and each initiative within the model allows managers and leaders to better evaluate which parts of the data centre are performing well and which require improvement. This helps focus time and resources towards areas with the most potential and inspires departments to take steps towards attaining higher levels of the DCMM whilst crucially using the higher levels of the model to inform the data centre and IT strategy.

 

A key aspect of the model is that, unlike some others, DCMM does not promote particular technologies or methods for attaining the goals of each level. The model provides a framework and benchmarks, as opposed to specifics, to promote individuals and teams to innovate and collaborate to achieve higher levels of efficiency not seen today. That said, like PUE, DCMM should not be used to compare facilities from different organisations - the best use of the DCMM is for continuous improvement and for the higher levels of the DCMM to motivate data centre designers and the industry to innovate..

 

We fully intend the model to be organic – constantly changing and evolving as the whole industry advances. We see it as a living document, stimulating innovation in markets across the world- continually being updated and growing whilst data centres share, learn and progress. As such, we welcome active participation and feedback from organisations in the public sector to help us evolve and update the model according to their need and changes in the industry. 

 

The DCMM promotes collaboration, innovation, and change, pushing the industry forward without constrained thinking because it emphasises resulting efficiencies rather than prescriptive steps.  Our ultimate goal is for data centers around the world to be able to do more with less, minimise their

environmental impact, and take advantage of each others’ insights to reach efficiencies faster using the

common language of the Data Center Maturity Model.