Isra-Mart srl:Green Grid targets datacentre water and carbon use

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Sustainability professionals are well aware that datacentres represent one of the main consumers of energy in any business, but what is less well known is that their use of cooling systems means they are also significant users of water.

Now a leading IT industry group is attempting to tackle the problem with the launch of two new metrics designed to make it easier for firms to measure the water use and carbon footprint of their server farms.

The Green Grid group, which contains many of the biggest names in the IT industry and pioneered a global standard for measuring the energy efficiency of datacentres, announced late last week that it was branching out to cover additional sustainability metrics with the launch of new Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) indices.

"Our members firmly believe that decision-makers need the right tools to design, build and operate their datacentres in a sustainable way as they plan for increased computing, networking and storage demands," said Jack Pouchet, Emerson Network Power representative and board member of The Green Grid.

"CUE and WUE metrics are significant steps forward in helping datacentre operators measure the effectiveness of carbon and water use by their datacentres. Using a sound set of metrics such as PUE, CUE and WUE will lead to better managing of natural resources and can potentially reduce consumption."

The WUE, which will be published early next year, will mirror the Green Grids existing Power Usage Effective metric, providing managers with a single score detailing the efficiency of their water use based on the amount of water being used by a datacentre facility and the amount being used to actually support IT equipment.

Similarly, the CUE, which was outlined in a white paper released last week, adapts the PUE to give datacentre managers a measure of their carbon efficiency and allows them to calculate how shifting to low-carbon power sources will help to reduce their environmental impact.