The Raritan Blog

Comparing Annualized and Peak PUE

Jessica Ciesla
August 7, 2019

The Green Grid® introduced the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric in 2007, and it’s currently the de facto standard for measuring a data center’s efficiency. The traditional method of calculating a data center’s PUE is to collect the required data manually and add it to a worksheet at predetermined intervals, whereupon an application calculates the PUE. A more advanced method of obtaining the PUE is to use intelligent rack PDUs that take the measurements and transmit them to a DCIM power monitoring solution that automatically calculates the PUE. Many data center managers are still unclear on what PUE is, how it’s calculated and what it’s used for. Most managers understand that their PUE should be as close to 1 as possible, but they may not know why this measurement is desirable.