Where is your organisation in terms of date centre ‘maturity’? You could immediately question what such a concept could mean – performance, capacity, throughput, organisational efficiency? For one organisation at least, the answer is slightly different: how much money does it waste in terms of power, cooling and heat.

Thus The Green Grid and its just-released work on new ways to benchmark how your site is doing in a matrix of measurements of efficiency. You may already be familiar with its PUE metric (power usage effectiveness); so how about new ones for measuring CUE (carbon usage effectiveness), ERE (energy reuse effectiveness) and even WUE (water usage effectiveness)?

Those are only part of its new set of resources, though, the aforementioned Maturity Model being the main news, according to Jim Hearnden, European chair of its Data Centre Design Guide Group (and who has a day job as an enterprise technologist with Dell, one of the body’s founder members).

"We’ve grouped together a lot of our research and thinking into an overall Model that can help businesses grade themselves on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 would be the highest-end in terms of green and power," he told CBR. In this model, a level 5 data centre would, for example, have literally no internal a/c and would rely on pure fresh air ("air side cooling") as the temperature control medium, while a 1 would be where the site had, say, zero blanking panels, poor grouping of hot and cold equipment, and so on.

In other words – where most of us are? "There are no level 5s, at least yet," confirmed Hearnden. "And there may never be, in all features, for most organisations. Very few are even at level 3, to be honest. So, yes, most of us are still at levels 1 or 1.5, I’d say."

It’s worth saying that being a 1 or a 1.5 doesn’t mean you aren’t trying. The group says that this is all about current understanding of what best practice allows.

It may be that you’re not that bothered being a 3 or a 4 – or even feel it that shameful being a 0. Hasn’t ‘green IT’ gone off the boil a bit anyway? Hearnden doesn’t think so. "There’s been a perception that the green aspect was good for your public facing window but not much beyond that. That’s changing, I think, as CIOs realize that really this is about internal efficiency and cost savings above all. For instance, I think Europe is leading the charge here thanks partly to legislation but also money – energy costs have gone up higher here than the US, so we’re paying more attention to the issue."

A lot of work has gone into this – at least 18 months – so even if you intend to remain a confirmed Green IT sceptic, you may still find something useful in here about the more effective and efficient use of resources. Check it out – it can’t hurt.

If you are interested in the Data Centre Maturity Model, check out the Green Grid’s white paper on it here.

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