There's a new data center cooling assessment metric in town

Future Facilities is a premier provider of engineering simulation software for global data center design and operational planning.

The company's just released its assessment service for The Green Grid's newly released Performance Indicator (PI).

Since its formulation in 2006, Future Facilities says Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) has been the gold standard for the measurement of data center energy efficiency.

Mark Seymour, CTO of Future Facilities says PUE has been, and remains to be a useful benchmark for data centers to define their power usage effectiveness.

"Ten years later, owners and operators have been looking for the next step to better understand their cooling and identify opportunities to help ensure that their investments in mission critical facilities can confidently deliver maximum capacity for the business effectively and efficiently," explains Seymour.

PUE is still useful in measuring energy use in data centers and how corresponding changes affect that score over time, however the company says that while the metric provides an important overview of the energy use in a data center, additional indicators are needed to provide a more precise evaluation.

So, the Green Grid brought together a number of industry experts and as a result, the group recently released the Performance Indicator. Future Facilities describes it as a new approach to assessing and visualizing data center cooling performance using three uniquely defined metrics that interact with each other.

The organization highlights the three metrics as below:

• PUE ratio (PUEr) - expressing PUE in relation to intended operation
• IT Thermal Conformance - ensuring the IT operates at suitable air inlet temperatures in normal operation
• IT Thermal Resilience - minimizing the risk of equipment overheat in the cases of redundant cooling system failure and/or planned maintenance

Data centers of all sizes can use the Green Grid's new Performance Indicator to gain the most detailed understanding possible of their cooling effectiveness.

"The new PI assessment and visualization is a simple, yet revolutionary, tool that goes far toward this goal, and Future Facilities' new Assessment Service harnesses this innovation to help data centers increase their performance based on the detailed information it provides.