Data Center Power Use Effectiveness (PUE): Understanding the Contributing Factors

If you are interested in data center design or performance, you’ve undoubtedly been seeing sales sheets, white papers, and news reports of products and techniques for increasing data center energy efficiency. The metric most often quoted in data center power use efficiency is Power Use Effectiveness (PUE) and its inverse, Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCIE). PUE and DCIE compare the data center facility’s overall power consumption to the power consumed by the information and communication technology (ICT) equipment. These metrics, which are primarily facilities-based, will probably serve as the framework for a future standard; however, they are still being developed.