resources

Energy efficiency can be described as the amount of “useful work” accomplished in relation to the energy consumed to perform said work. Defining data center efficiency therefore requires an acceptable standard definition of “useful work.”

While each data center varies by the type, value, and criticality of the business services it provides, there are similarities in the types of business services that most data centers provide, and these can be categorized as “useful work.” Categorizing data centers by their useful work and/or applications being used should aid in describing and defining the measures by which energy efficiency for the supported business can be assessed.

The Green Grid has created a set of archetypes that describe “typical” workload or application groupings of useful work. These archetypes enable the development of standard comparison metrics that properly represent the variety of data center productivity targets. They also make it possible to make baseline comparisons of the energy efficiency of one data center’s unique business services with another’s.