The Green Grid group, a global consortium of IT companies and professionals, has developed two additional metrics to assist companies in addressing their carbon emissions and water usage in the organization.

The Green Grid group’s primary goal is to unite global industry efforts to standardize on a common set of metrics, processes and new technologies to further its common goals. The Green Grid is linked to a number of global technical organizations and government entities to collaborate in the creation and adoption of a common set of metrics and standards for data center efficiency. The document outlines ones Carbon Usage Effectiveness or CUE and can now be viewed on their website. Green Grid’s existing Power Usage Effectiveness or PUE have been widely adopted by such technology giants as Google and Microsoft.  Clearly these industry standard metrics will be of significant value to any organization looking to reduce their energy consumption and lower their carbon footprint. Let’s look at each one a bit more closely. 

PUE: is the process of measuring how much of the total electricity consumption actually goes to IT equipment versus what is lost on inefficient power supplies and cooling equipment.

CUE: is important in that it will help determine the amount of greenhouse gas emissions are derived from IT gear in the Data Center.

WUE: is a metric that will assist individuals to determine the amount of water used in the organization and the amount that is used to deliver IT operations.

As IT Operations and Data Centers continue to receive increased scrutiny to become more environmentally friendly as it relates to their usage of energy and water consumption. The metrics provided by Green Grid could be the jump start organizations need in measuring their overall energy consumption and their direction in lowering it. The new metrics will be open for discussion at Green Grid’s technical Forum coming in March. The audience members include such companies as Microsoft, Oracle, HP and Target.

On the Web: http://www.thegreengrid.org/