One obstacle to improving energy efficiency in data centers is that most organizations have no idea of how they’re doing. A new metric known as CADE — Corporate Average Datacenter Efficiency — offers a gauge of efficiency that can be used to benchmark performance across an entire organization.
CADE has four components, two related to IT and two related to facilities.
CADE is determined by multiplying those components. Facility energy efficiency is multiplied by facility utilization to get a score for facility efficiency. IT efficiency is calculated by multiplying IT energy efficiency by IT utilization. As IT efficiency goes up, facility efficiency is likely to go down. This creates capacity to not build additional data centers to accommodate server growth. CADE is the product of multiplying facility efficiency by IT efficiency. The higher the CADE, the better.
CADE can be calculated for an individual data center. The average value across an enterprise is found by weighting data centers based on installed facility capacity.
Today, many data centers have a CADE score for servers of between 5 and 15 percent. By using CADE to focus on improvement, adopting best facility practices and taking advantage of IT measures like shutting off servers no longer being used and buying more energy-efficient servers, most data centers can at least double their CADE scores. Being more aggressive can result in a tenfold or more improvement.
Kenneth Brill is the founder and executive director of the Uptime Institute and the Site Uptime Network. He developed the concept of dual power in the early nineties and was one of the originators of the industry’s Tier system for evaluating data center design.
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