224 Int. J. Energy Technology and Policy, Vol. 8, Nos.

3/4/5/6, 2012

Criteria to select energy efficiency metrics to

measure performance of data centre

Mueen Uddin* and Azizah Abdul Rahman

Department of Information Systems,
Faculty of Computer Science & Information Systems,
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia,
UTM Skudai, 81310, Johor, Malaysia
E-mail: mueenmalik9516@gmail.com
E-mail: azizahar@utm.my
*Corresponding author

Asadullah Shah
Department of Computer Science,
Kulliyyah of Information and Communication Technology,
International Islamic University Malaysia,
P.O. Box 10, 53100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
E-mail: Asadullah@kict.iium.edu.my

Abstract: The progress and expansion of data centre industry is driven by

ever growing business domains, end user applications from consumers and
performance improvement limitations. Due to continuous increase in the size
and magnitude of these tier level data centres there is a continuous demand for
energy consumption and emission of green house gases that has started to limit
further performance progression due to overwhelming electricity bills and
global warming effects hazardous for global health and environmental
sustainability. The research highlighted in this paper discusses about
instigates and problems of high power/energy consumption, and explores the
reasons why energy savings in data centre is an important issue. It then
spotlights the importance of implementing green metrics for measuring
efficiency of data centre in terms of energy consumption and CO2 emissions.
Metrics are instruments used to measure the performance of data centre.
We proposed a methodology to choose appropriate metrics suitable for
measuring data centre efficiency and performance in terms of energy
efficiency, cost savings, green initiatives and CO2 emissions. The proposed
methodology helps data centre managers to select appropriate metrics and then
set benchmarks.

Keywords: benchmarking; data centres; energy efficiency; green house gases;

metrics.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Uddin, M., Rahman, A.A.
and Shah, A. (2012) Criteria to select energy efficiency metrics to measure
performance of data centre, Int. J. Energy Technology and Policy, Vol. 8,
Nos. 3/4/5/6, pp.224237.

Copyright 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

 Criteria to select energy efficiency metrics 225

Biographical notes: Mueen Uddin is a PhD fellow at Universiti Teknologi

Malaysia (UTM). His research interests include green IT, energy efficient data
centres, green metrics, global warming effects, virtualisation, cloud computing,
digital content protection and deep packet inspection, intrusion detection and
prevention systems, MANET routing protocols. He has BS and MS in
Computer Science from Isra University Pakistan with specialty in information
networks. He has over 20 international journal and many conference
publications.

Azizah Abdul Rahman is an Associate Professor at Universiti Teknologi

Malaysia. Her research interests include designing and implementing
techniques for information systems in an organisational perspective, knowledge
management, designing networking systems in reconfigurable hardware and
software, and implementing security protocols needed for e-businesses. She
has BS and MS from USA, and PhD in information systems from Universiti
Teknologi Malaysia. She is a member of the IEEE, AIS, ACM, and JIS. She is
a renowned researcher with over 50 publications in various international
journals and conferences.

Asadullah Shah is a Professor at International Islamic University Malaysia. His

research interests include information system management, multimedia media
systems, and compression techniques, network security. He has PhD in
Multimedia Systems from University of Surrey, UK. He is a member of the
IEEE and ACM. He is a renowned researcher with over 70 publications in
journals and conferences.

1 Introduction

The commercial, organisational and political landscape has changed fundamentally for
data centre operators due to the confluence of apparently incompatible demands and
constraints. The energy use and environmental impact of data centres has recently
become a significant issue for both operators and policy makers. Public perception of
climate change and environmental impact has changed substantially, delivering real
commercial impacts for corporate environmental policy and social responsibility.
Unfortunately, data centres represent a relatively easy target due to very high density of
energy consumption and ease of measurement in comparison to other, possibly more
significant areas of IT energy use. Policy makers have identified IT, specifically data
centre energy use as one of the fastest rising sectors (Newcombe, 2009).
The data centre industry has emerged as a significant corporate asset, playing a vital
role in business management and providing end user services like storage, backups,
networking and dissemination of data, etc. To fulfil these requirements data centres
underwent an evolution as the computing, backups and data storage capacities increased
significantly. They have morphed from dedicated computer rooms at large businesses,
universities and public institutions into stand-alone, complex sprawling facilities, serving
as the backbone of todays ever increasing businesses. The demand for greater data centre
capacity in further is rising rapidly for many reasons like:
226 M. Uddin et al.

the growing use of internet media and online learning, and demands for faster
connectivity from users
a move to web-based interfaces which are more computed intensive to deliver
increasing requirements for comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery
arrangements which results in duplication of facilities
introduction of comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) software solutions
which are much more compute intensive than earlier software
increasing digitisation of data
rapidly expanding data storage and backup requirements.
Data centres houses high density of digital electronics and computer technology
equipments, requiring greater quality and more reliable electric power than most
commercial buildings. They are essentially building shells packed with computers,
servers, power supplies, power conditioning equipment, control electronics, and backup
power systems along with air conditioning systems to keep the equipment cooled to
optimum operating temperatures. Data centres are the buildings with high concentrations
of computers and digital electronic equipment dedicated to hosting websites, supporting
e-commerce and providing essential services for the new digital economy are fairly
recent phenomena. They range in size from a small computer room housing a few server
racks to 200,000 square feet (ft2) or greater dedicated facilities holding tens to hundreds
of server racks. The computers used in data centres are generally known as servers. The
racks are placed on a raised floor area, which serves as a plenum allowing cooled air to
move below the racks, then up through perforated floor tiles to cool the racks before
being drawn back through the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system.
The power requests by these large server farms are quite high one to two hundred watts
per square feet or more. This is twenty times greater than modern commercial buildings,
which require only five to ten watts per square foot (W/ft2) (Beck, 2001).
There has been an unprecedented increase on the level of concern regarding climate
change and environmental sustainability (Uddin et al., 2011). Businesses are under
increasing pressure from customers, shareholders and users to propose legislative
changes to improve their environmental credentials. Likewise, the environmental impact
of Information Technology under the banner of Green IT has started being discussed by
academia, media and government. IT professionals are expected to play significant
roles in bringing Green IT to organisations, provided they are prepared, have developed
or developing necessary capabilities to lead and support sustainability initiatives
(Molla et al., 2009).
One of the key challenges of rising data centres are the increasing demand for energy
consumption by servers and other components in data centre and continuous increase in
the emission of green house gases (CO2) very hazardous for global warming (Uddin and
Rahman, 2011). Organisations are now become more concerned about their environment
and energy saving models (Cisco Energy Efficient Data Centre Solutions and Best
Practices, 2007). With the increase in businesses and demands from end users, the size of
data centres also grows tremendously. Servers are the main components responsible for
performing almost all of the processing, and their number is increasing rapidly so as to
meet the industry demands. According to Gartner Global server shipments grew from
 Criteria to select energy efficiency metrics 227

7.5 million annually in 2005 to nine million in 2008 (Gartner, 2009).With the recent
development and growth in the size these server farms, the number of servers
continuously increases as the demand for networking, storage, speed, backups and
recovery and computation increases. These servers consume a lot of energy and power to
perform processing, hence generate too much CO2 and their utilisation ratio is also low.
In an average server environment, 30% of the servers are dead only consuming energy,
without being properly utilised (Uddin and Rahman, 2010).
As data centres add, move, and change servers, many on a daily basis, they need to
continue to monitor and manage heat generation and cooling requirements. Solutions
have to be provided for managing energy usage of data centres over the long term to
achieve maximum energy efficiency. Research is going on to investigate how IT
equipment energy consumption varies with computation loads and develop quantitative
metrics, refine metrics and measurement protocols for benchmarking servers.

Figure 1 Global server shipments increase from eight million in 2007 to 8.5 million in 2012
(see online version for colours)

Benchmarking data centres energy efficiency is a first key step towards reducing power
consumption and related energy costs. Benchmarking enables to understand the current
level of efficiency in a data centre, and as implement additional efficiency best practices,
it helps gauge the effectiveness of those efficiency efforts.
The data centre power density has increased to an average 15% annually between
2000 and 2009. The increasing concerns about the increased rack density, quantity of
servers, emission of green house gases and global warming issues has raised the
significance of data centre energy consumption and now has become a momentous factor
to managing data centres energy consumption and CO2 emissions (Scaramella and
Eastwood, 2008) . Data centre managers lacked the tools to effectively address these
challenges. The network management systems essential to IT personnel in monitoring
and managing IT equipment did not address the critical issues of energy consumption,
available rack capacity or ambient air temperatures that are essential to proactive data
centre management. When a data centre reaches its maximum provisioned power, it must
be replaced or augmented at great expense. Gartner estimates that half of the worlds data
centres will reach this point by the end of 2008 (Gartner, Inc., 2006).
228 M. Uddin et al.

Rapid construction of data centres over the past five years or so proceeded at
breakneck pace between 2000 and 2005 to feed the needs of the expanding digital
economy, the bursting of the high-tech stock bubble in 2005 to 2010, has increased the
demand for cost effective data centres to meet quickly increasing and highly competitive
demands for digital information services and has led to inefficiencies in data centre
energy use. However, data centre owners and operators do not want to release their power
requirements or load profiles publicly because they fear this could hurt their
competitiveness. Lack of clear definitions of power demand make data centre energy
characterisations difficult, with a number of factors lead to overstated power
requirements. This provides time and an opportunity to examine data centre construction
and operational practices with an eye towards reducing their energy demands through the
use of energy efficient technologies and energy smart design practices. As energy climbs
the list of corporate priorities, Green IT solutions are proliferating. Prioritising potential
fixes is not easy amidst this flood of information.
Capital expenditure increases enormously to meet the greater demand of computing
power to meet the business challenges. Application compatibility issues resulting in
significant server sprawl. Provisioning new servers is a lengthy, labour intensive process
and increases operating expenditures as well as power and cooling costs. At the same
time, servers are often underutilised. Typically, server workloads consume only 5% of
their total physical capacity, wasting hardware, space, and electricity. It is a challenge for
IT to keep pace with the much faster rate of business growth and change. According to
the EPA, servers consumed 80% of the total IT load and 40% of total data centre power
consumption in 2006 (EPA, 2007).
The US House of Representatives adopted bill 5646, which calls for additional
research to reduce energy costs and electricity consumption by computer servers
and data centres. The bill directs Environmental Protection Agency EPA to identify the
potential energy and cost saving to the federal government and private business
through the purchase of energy efficient servers and include an indication from congress
that it is in the best interest of the USA that server buyers give high priority to energy
efficiency.
Defining energy performance is a prerequisite for most energy efficiency policies and
programmes, and programmes targeting data centres are no different. The way that
performance is measured is critical, as it can determine if a server or other equipment will
meet a consumers needs or be eligible for utility rebates or required as part of federal or
state procurement requirements. Research is going on to develop metrics and measure to
optimise the performance of data centres to make them energy efficient and green
(Malone and Belady, 2007).
This paper looks at the background of the problem and explores the reasons why
energy savings in the data centre is an important issue. It then highlights the importance
of proper energy utilisation in data centres and tries to develop a criteria for data centre
managers to select and develop appropriate metrics for calculating the efficiency of their
data centres in terms of energy consumptions and CO2 emissions so that new green
techniques should be adopted to increase the efficiency of data centre and reduce the
effects of global warming. What metrics could a company or an organisation use to
measure the effectiveness of their green initiatives for energy savings in the data centre?
There is no any industry standard mechanism available to categorise hardware resources
into some groups so that when any energy efficiency Metrics is applied it can easily
 Criteria to select energy efficiency metrics 229

calculate the energy utilisation of these resources. Many governments and other
organisations like green grid, energy star, EPA and LEED are working to develop
standardise metrics to be acceptable to all data centre managers in all tiers of data centre
industry. Developing performance metrics for even the simplest types of equipment can
prove difficult and controversial.
The proposed criterion will helps to benchmark the current state of data centres and
then compares it with new energy efficiency techniques applied for the proper utilisation
of hardware and software resources like virtualisation and cloud computing in order to
increase the utilisation of already installed devices (servers) and also decrease the energy
demands in these ever growing data centres.

2 Problem statement

Continuous increase in size and volume and of data centres due to rapid growth in
businesses especially Internet-based businesses has caused a tremendous increase in the
energy consumption by data centres. These energy consumptions are crafting enormous
problems for global warming by emitting green house gases very hazardous for
environmental health. The developing countries like Pakistan which are already facing
huge energy deficits, it becomes very difficult to cop up with the continuous business
demands to enlarge their data centres to fulfil rising business requirements. The problem
with data centre industry is the lack of a universal energy efficiency metrics and then
criteria to select and develop appropriate metrics to measure the performance of data
centre individually and as whole.

3 Problem background

3.1 Energy and environmental impact of data centres

The number of servers in the world will increase from 18 million in 2007 to 122 million
in 2020 (Climate Group and GeSI, 2008). These servers also have much greater
processing capacity than current models. The historic trend of rising total power
consumption per server as depicted in Table 1 is therefore likely to continue. This growth
will create many adverse environmental effects, especially those arising from the energy
consumption by different data centre equipments and resources like servers and other
impacts like cooling and humidification, etc., disposal of end of life equipment is also
causing problems.
The recent study by Climate Group and GeSI in 2008 has analysed these impacts in
terms of their CO2 emissions. It forecasts that the global data centre footprints, including
equipments used and embodied carbon, will rises to more than 259 million tons in 2020,
almost triple in amount, compared to 76 million tones of CO2 equivalent emissions in
2002. The total emissions represent about 14% and 18% respectively of their total ICT
related emissions. ICT related CO2 equivalent emissions are said to be about 2% of the
global total emissions, and data centres account for around 0.3% of global CO2 equivalent
emissions (Climate Group and GeSI, 2008).
230 M. Uddin et al.

Table 1 Weighted average power (Watts) of top six servers

Type of USA World

servers 2000 2003 2005 2000 2003 2005
Volume 186 207 217 183 214 218
Mid-range 424 524 641 423 522 638
High-end 5,534 6,428 10,673 4,874 5,815 12,682
Source: Koomey (2007)
Emissions of green house gases from aviations, shipping, Transportations,
telecommunications and the manufacturing of cement are rising fast, but the emissions
from IT are rising faster. Reductions achieved through the use of Green IT in other key
economic sectors would be five times greater than the growth in emissions from the IT
sector itself. That is quite something given that the growth in those emissions from IT is
projected to increase from 3% of total global emissions in 2009 to a whopping 6% by
2020 [SMART 2020 Report in 2008 (on behalf of the Global e-Sustainability
Initiative)].
Table 2 CO2 emissions (carbon foot print) the climate group and the Global e-Sustainability
initiative SMART 2020

Emissions 2007 Percentage Emissions 2020 Percentage

World
MtCO2e 2007 MtCO2e 2020
World 830 100% 1430 100%
Server farms/data centres 116 14% 257 18%
Telecom infrastructure 307 37% 358 25%
and devices
PCs and peripherals 407 49% 815 57%

The energy consumption of data centres has greatly increased over the last decade,
primarily due to increased computational activities, increased businesses, increased
demand from end users, and reliability of services often achieved through equipment
redundancy (Hopper and Rice, 2008). In US data centres consumed a total of 61 billion
kWh of electricity, 1.5% of national consumption in 2005, and are expected to double by
2011 (EPA, 2007). These high energy consumptions of course translate into high energy
costs. The total power and cooling bill for servers in the USA stands at whopping
$14 billion a year, and if current trends persist, that bill is going to rise to $50 billion by
the end of decade (EPA, 2009). Data centres are spending an increasingly large portion of
their budgets on power, cooling and maintenance. According to IDC, in 2006, businesses
worldwide spent about $55.4 billion on new servers and approximately $29 billion to
power and cool those machines. That is almost half the cost of the equipment itself for
every $1 spent on the server, $0.50 is spent on energy to power and cool it. The amount
of money businesses spend to power and cool the data centre continues to increase. An
EPA (2007) report to US congress in 2007 concluded that, by the end of 2008, 50% of
the data centres would be running out of power dealing with this is not easy, as power
grids are often operating near to capacity.
Interestingly, Google and Microsoft are said to be responding to these pressures by
moving towards a model of data centres using 100% renewable energy, and being
 Criteria to select energy efficiency metrics 231

independent of the electricity grid, a model which some believe will give them
considerable competitive advantage in a world of constrained power supply, and
discouragement of fossil fuel use through carbon regulation (Microsoft, 2009).
Gartner (2008) predicts that energy costs may increase from 10% of the IT budget to
over 50% in the next few years. Figure 2 compares the purchasing dollars spent on new
servers with the power and cooling costs since 1996 and projects those numbers until
2011. IDC says the cost to power servers will exceed the cost of servers by the next year
(Brill, 2007). The US Department of Energy states that energy consumption for
a data centre can be 100 times higher than that of a typical commercial building.
Reducing electricity consumption in todays data centres is being addressed in
initiatives from hardware vendors, lawmakers and performance benchmarking
organisations.

Figure 2 Worldwide cost to power and cool server installed base, 19962011 (see online version
for colours)

As electricity becomes increasingly expensive due to accelerating demand and carbon

emissions regulations, data centre operators have less control over their fixed data centre
energy costs. It is challenging to keep operators remain competitive while reducing their
cost per user without cutting vital headcount. With the appropriate power management
policies and measurement systems, the data centre manager will have a greater
understanding of, and control over, power consumption. This enhanced control enables
more successful execution of equipment refresh, updates and maintenance. It also
provides superior visibility over the performance and efficiency of the entire network,
facilitating the ability to pinpoint areas of opportunity and demonstrate the effectiveness
of greener strategies.
The data centres have become an increasingly important part of most business
operations in the twenty-first century. With escalating demand and rising energy prices, it
is essential for the owners and operators of these mission critical facilities to assess and
improve their performance with energy efficiency metrics. However, even with the global
presence of many companies, these metrics are often not applied consistently at a global
level.
232 M. Uddin et al.

4 Proposed work

4.1 Data centre level benchmarks and metrics

The major barrier in improving energy efficiency in data centre is the lack of appropriate
metrics. Metrics are instruments to measure and serve as an indicator of progress
(Green Grid Metrics, 2008). The importance of rational, measurable metrics therefore
becomes imperative to measure and manage the data centre. A wealth of metrics and
benchmarks has been accumulated that could all be applied to data centre management.
While some of the metrics addressed individual components, others were system level
metrics that encompass larger abstract subsystems. Many metrics have been proposed to
quantify various aspects of data centre energy efficiency, from the buildings power and
cooling provisioning to the utilisation of the computing equipment. The Uptime Institute
identified a variety of metrics contributing to data centre greenness, including
measures of power conversion efficiency at the server and data centre levels, as well as
the utilisation efficiency of the deployed hardware (Stanely et al., 2007). To optimise data
centre cooling, a metric based on performance per unit of exergy destroyed is advocated
to manage the power and cooling issues (Patel, 2003). Exergy is the available energy in a
thermodynamic sense, and so exergy aware metrics take into account the conversion of
energy into different forms. In particular, exergy is expended when electrical power is
converted to heat and when heat is transported across thermal resistances. The Green
Grid, an industrial consortium including most major hardware vendors, has proposed
several metrics to quantify data centre power efficiency over both space and time. To
quantify space efficiency, they define the data centre density (DCD) metric as the ratio of
the power consumed by all equipment on the raised floor to the area of the raised floor, in
units of kW/ft2 (Green Grid Metrics: Describing the Data Centre Power Efficiency,
2007). To quantify time efficiency (i.e., energy efficiency), data centre infrastructure
efficiency (DCiE) metric has been proposed (Green Grid Metrics: Describing the Data
Centre Power Efficiency, 2007). DCiE is defined as the percentage of the total facility
power that goes to the IT equipment (primarily compute, storage, and network). Green
Grid has also introduced data centre energy productivity metric (DCeP), which is the
useful work divided by the total facility power (The Green Grid: A Framework for Data
Center Energy Productivity, 2008). This metric can be applied to any data centre workload.
None of these data centre metrics specifies a workload, and most do not take any measure
of performance into account. Also there is no particular criterion available for data centre
managers to select appropriate metric that will be useful for measuring the energy
consumption individually and as whole and CO2 emissions.

4.2 Criteria to select and develop green metrics

Energy efficiency metrics and benchmarks are used to track the performance of data
centre in terms of energy efficiency and CO2 emissions. They identify potential
opportunities to reduce energy use in data centres. The importance of rationale,
measurable metrics becomes imperatives to measure and manage the DC performance
(Rivoire et al., 2007). Metrics help and facilitate energy optimisations by defining energy
efficient technologies. Unlike the significance of power management and optimisations,
there has been relatively little focus on metrics and models (Uddin and Rahman, 2012).
Metrics are needed to evaluate proposed solutions, whether they involve designing
 Criteria to select energy efficiency metrics 233

individual components, assembling complete systems or data centres, or dynamically

adjusting a component or systems power consumption. These metrics should correlate
strongly with the concerns of end users, while also being understandable, general, and
practical to calculate. The basic steps that help define and improve a metric would
include assessment, analysis and benchmarking, design, plan and implementation (Loper
and Parr, 2007).
There is no global, industry wide recognised standard metrics available today that
defines a green data centre, each organisation needs to define what green means to it.
Data centre is generally considered a purpose-built facility or portion thereof that houses
a businesss mission-critical applications. A green connotation supposes that the facility
has either been retrofitted or initially designed to mitigate its power consumption through
the strategic application of available technologies. The long-term goal of the green data
centre operation is to achieve carbon neutrality. The biggest problems any metrics faces
when applied for calculating energy efficiency is the lack of standardised system of
categorising different resources of data centre. The proposed Metrics selection criterion
helps to better and properly utilise all equipment assets in data centre so that their
utilisation ratio can be increased to maximum level. It also provides an ability to
benchmark (and measure improved) performance and demonstrates continuous
improvement and superior performance for energy efficiency and lower the total cost of
ownership. The criterion defines that metrics should have following properties defined as
attributes for the selection to be an effective metrics.
1 Definition of metrics
The metric must provide and contain the following attributes:
it must clarify the definition of data centre performance/energy
it must define the Area to be measured in data centre
it must specify the base of energy values so that new values can be compared
and benchmarking can be set
it must define the scope of data centre management according to the type of
services it provides
it must provide solutions for energy efficiency improvement according to data
centre activities and infrastructures
it must clearly define the method of selecting IT equipment and total power as
input to data centre.
2 Measurement capability
proper regulations should be set on measurement methods to measure the
efficiency and achieve desired objectives
in situation where measurement is difficult to perform and results does not show
the desired values, there should be a mechanism of setting some estimation
methods to find the nearest values
measurement conditions such as service level agreements should be followed
while measuring values
metrics must be simple and cost effective, i.e., measurement costs should
be low.
234 M. Uddin et al.

3 Usage of metrics
metric must consider data centre diversity and divide it into Segments before
applying appropriate metrics
it must follow security considerations and constraints already deployed
metric must be easy to use and serves as motivation for both businesses and
tenants (users)
it must have provision of numerical information
it should provide an effective way of evaluating and cooperative efforts for
energy efficiency improvement activities.

5 Methodology and results

The areas considered for measurement are grouped and these are:
1 IT power consumption
2 facilities power consumption
3 performance of the system space used within the facility
4 geographical location of the facility.
These all elements are arranged in a layer called facilities layer. This layer will be the top
layer. After that a component layer will be developed beneath the facilities layer which
consists of small components from top layer elements. For example under IT power,
there are subcategories of server, network and storage power.
The research documented in this paper consisted of reviewing industry news report
related to implementing green technology in data centres to ensure proper utilisation of
energy in data centres and then calculating energy efficiency in data centres. Form these
reports it was found that server consolidation, power management and data centre cooling
were considered important for the measurement of energy consumption and CO2
emissions in data centre.
Interviews were conducted from top managers including directors from IT data
centres operations, environmental initiatives and enterprise infrastructures. The survey
results from interviews are then normalised and it seemed surprising that performance
and cost were the most important attributes. From these results it was found that
managing capital costs and operating expenses are the vital to data centres viability. One
of the primary approaches to analysing energy consumption is conducting an asset
inventory. An estimate of overall power consumed can be developed by aggregating the
power used by each individual piece of equipment or rack. Computerised energy
simulation software can be used to perform these energy calculations. Power is not just
used to operate servers and IT equipment. Additional energy is used to heat, cool,
illuminate and ventilate the data centre. As stated previously, IDC estimates that 50 cents
of every dollar spent on a new server goes to power and cooling. These all studies
highlight the importance of criteria for the selection and development of appropriate
metrics in order to help data centre operators and managers to achieve green data centres.
The steps used to measure the performance in terms of energy efficiency and CO2
 Criteria to select energy efficiency metrics 235

emissions and then doing the analysis to get aggregate values to benchmark and set
standards for metrics are:
1 select the metric type using above criteria that must fulfil all three demands of
becoming a useful metric
2 select data centre type depending on tiers described by ITE (Tier I, II, III and IV) to
be evaluated and measured
3 measure and identify current individual and overall energy performance and CO2
emissions (baseline values)
4 select benchmark values for energy efficiency and CO2 emissions
5 identify and highlight potential areas for efficiency improvement in terms of:
energy cost
source energy
carbon emissions.
6 select the elapsed time of the assessment period
7 select the mean of source load for the assessment period
8 select the mean of values obtained by applying the proposed metric
9 report the highest daily values occurring during assessment period
10 identify the lowest daily values occurring during assessment period
11 collect the data from different assessment periods
12 analyse the data.
By applying the proposed criteria to select appropriate metrics and then applying the
above stated methodology appropriate values for making data centres green, energy
efficient and environment friendly can be generated that will help data centre managers to
make their businesses sustainable and eco friendly.

6 Conclusions and discussions

In recent years, energy efficiency has emerged as one of the most important design
requirements for modern computing systems, such as data centres, as they continue to
consume enormous amounts of electrical power. Apart from high operating costs incurred
by computing resources, this leads to significant emissions of carbon dioxide into the
environment. For example, currently IT infrastructures contribute about 2% of total CO2
footprints. Unless energy-efficient techniques and algorithms to manage computing
resources are developed, ITs contribution in the worlds energy consumption and CO2
emissions is expected to rapidly grow. This is obviously unacceptable in the age of
climate change and global warming. In this paper, we have studied and classified
different ways to achieve power and energy efficiency in data centres. This paper
proposes a criterion for data centre managers to select proper energy efficiency metrics
for their data centres. It then proposes a strategy to apply the selected metrics to measure
236 M. Uddin et al.

the performance of data centre in terms of energy efficiency and CO2 emissions. The
proposed work will help data centre managers to achieve sustainable and environment
friendly businesses.

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