Mar 10, 2010 (PRN): Deciding how to invest in your data centre infrastructure to produce the highest return on investment, increase the ability of the facility to respond to IT growth demands and reduce carbon footprint, can be made a lot easier using free resources available from APC by Schneider Electric’s website.

The resources include the company’s Data Center Efficiency Calculator, which provides a graphic depiction of how various power and cooling designs can affect the efficiency and electrical cost of typical data centre configurations, based on a tested and validated three parameter model.

Peter Hannaford, Vice President, Datacenters & Alliances, EMEA/LAM, APC by Schneider Electric.said “the Data Center Efficiency Calculator evaluates the comparative effects of different design or condition changes and therefore it provides a useful first step to guide decision making for any company which is looking at its energy use or carbon footprint as a result of the newly introduced Carbon Reduction Commitment.”

The Calculator model is based upon typical data centre configurations, so the user can get a reasonable estimate of the affect that, e.g., installing chilled water and/ close coupled cooling systems would have upon the overall facility energy bill. To obtain actual efficiency values, APC also offers a data centre efficiency assessment service that uses actual installation details and measurements for a given data centre.

Efficiency is expressed by the tool using the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric. The benefits of determining data centre infrastructure efficiency as part of an effective energy management plan are acknowledged, but in the course of providing a wide number of energy audits, APC has identified a number of problems when establishing the PUE of specific data centres.

Commonly published data centre efficiency data is not computed using a standard methodology, so the same data centre could demonstrate different efficiency ratings when different methodologies are applied. The result is obviously confusing and potentially costly and therefore APC by Schneider Electric has recently published White Paper #158; “Guidance for calculation of efficiency (PUE) in real data centers”.

Part of the problem is that real data centres tend to be located within buildings which have multiple purposes. This means that the appropriate measurement points to capture all data centre energy use need to be identified and combined with the power use of other subsystem to calculate the total input power. To complicate matters, it might be impractical to obtain some of these measurements and some devices may be shared with non-data centre applications.

The White Paper proposes a list of the various subsystems that should be included in data centre energy use analysis, along with how the energy use of these subsystems should be incorporated into PUE calculations. The paper also provides practical approaches for determining the energy use of shared devices as well as those that are hard to measure.

The Data Center Efficiency Calculator can be found at this link, while White Paper #158 is available today and can be downloaded from the APC website by clicking this link. In addition to these resources, has announced “Are you Ready to Make A Carbon Reduction Commitment?” – a 45-minute webinar on Wednesday 16th March at 11.00am. To register for the event please click here, or email lavina.dsouza@apcc.com for further information.

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