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Data Center Standard Proposal Adds WEE To PUE 62

Posted by timothy from the water-costs-something dept.
judgecorp writes: A proposed revision to the data center efficiency standard will delight the infantile by adding WEE to PUE. Seriously, PUE is widely used to compare data center efficiency, but critics say it is unfairly biased to sites in the Northern Hemisphere which can use evaporative cooling, and ignores the environmental impact of water use by data centers. Simply adding the evaporative energy of water to a measure based on electrical energy will face a lot of opposition however — on various grounds including science and marketing.
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Data Center Standard Proposal Adds WEE To PUE More

Data Center Standard Proposal Adds WEE To PUE

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  • Summarize better when introducing new acronyms. (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    WEE = water equivalent energy

    • The submittor knew that hardly anybody would know what these random acronyms would mean, and the editors simply don't give a shit. Standard slashdot. Well played.

      • TFA is just an excuse to put "WEE" and "PUE" in a headline. Otherwise, it is just stupid. Using evaporative cooling does not harm the environment, and is far better than using A/C powered by electricity from burning coal. To treat them as equivalent because they both involve "energy" is idiotic.

        • By that logic, energy doesn't harm the environment either because it can be from solar/wind/hydro/etc...
          Fresh water isn't infinite nor free.

          It makes a big deal if it is treated fit for human use water or grey water or from a lake/pond/river.
          Hopefully WEE takes that in to account.

          • Fresh water isn't infinite nor free.

            The amount of fresh water used in evaporative cooling is insignificant. California uses 14 trillion gallons of water annually, or an average of 38 billion gallons per day. A data center with evaporative cooling will use far less than a millionth of that. Conservation is important, but having a lack of perspective is not helpful in addressing the problem.

        • Agreed. I wrote TFA and did the WEE-PUE headline for fun. You are also right - this is a sort of false accounting, designed to match wishful thinking by DX vendors and data center operators in unfavourable climates. Peter Judge

    • I was aware what WEE means, I was wondering what PUE means.

      Well, or so I thought. Now I noticed that WEE ain't what it used to be either...

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday August 05, 2015 @06:04PM (#50259531)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      PUE (power usage effectiveness)
      WEE (water equivalent energy)
      and somewhere at datacenter dynamics magazine theres a giggling intern that needs to be shown the door.

      In correct English, PUE is not pronounced Poo. The U sound is emphasised and the e is de-emphasised. It will sound closer to "pew" than "poo" in your simple parlance.

      Pronouncing the U sound as a double O is Spanish, not English.

      • Due, flue, accrue, and sue beg to disagree.

      • In correct English

        No such thing. English is an amalgamation of a bunch of languages.

        Glue rhymes with poo.

        Anybody who tries to give a universal rule for English is going to be wrong in several corner cases. As evidence, I offer this [i18nguy.com], or this [etni.org.il].

        English is much less definable and explainable than people like to admit. Which is what makes it infinitely malleable and capable of doing things nobody thought of.

        I'm not convinced there is a single rule which says "in English you always ..." which is actually accura

    • I am that giggling intern, and have been for 20 years. Peter Judge

  • Here is an idea... (Score:3)

    by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Wednesday August 05, 2015 @06:11PM (#50259573)

    Compare them using the REAL metric, total life cycle costs...How much does it cost to buy, operate and dismantle your data center when it's usefulness is over... That's the REAL question.

    The rest of this PUE and WEE stuff is just window dressing and doesn't matter to ANY business beyond the PR value of claiming to be "green" or some such nonsense. If you want to be "green" slap up a solar panel farm or a windmill, or contract with your local power company for a % of renewable sourced electric power. Just call the cost what it really is, Public Relations and Advertisement.

    • Compare them using the REAL metric, total life cycle costs...How much does it cost to buy, operate and dismantle your data center when it's usefulness is over... That's the REAL question.

      And how do you measure sustainability costs? Buying price is not the true cost.

      • Total life cycle costs is what I said here.. Not the buying price of the facility, not just the monthly bills for things like electricity, water, maintenance, taxes, financing, and labor, but the cost over the WHOLE life of the project...

        Surely people in business have calculated all this long BEFORE they built the place... Because if they haven't, they are not very good at business. Two things you MUST do in business or you die... 1. Make enough profit and 2. Manage the cash flow. And PUE and WEE are not

        • Re: Here is an idea... (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          People, including those in business can be sloppy about their accounting, if you make enough profit on other things, you can have losses in other areas. Sometimes this is intentional, other times inadvertent.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        But PUE isn't that a good thing there either. It speaks to some overhead, but does not speak to how that power is sourced or how efficient it is put to use. A horribly inefficient processor that sucks down power can have really good PUE through a complex cooling system and in a region powered by coal, even if you can do the same work with a tenth of the power, but that part is not available in a design without a fan, and installed in a place where solar power provides a good chunk of the power. The more

    • Compare them using the REAL metric, total life cycle costs...How much does it cost to buy, operate and dismantle your data center when it's usefulness is over... That's the REAL question.

      Well, given that no matter how you're measuring it, the fact that materials were mined, and refined, and processed, and transported, and all of this involved an expenditure of energy in the first place, you've irrecoverably contributed to the entropy of the universe.

      So I'm not sure what you are asking, unless it's that we account for all entropic costs for all human activity, including accounting for the accounting for the entropic costs. Which is, of course, an absurd standard to hold anyone to, since met

      • For Pete's sake... I'm talking about ACCOUNTING here. What does it cost in dollars, or rubles, or bit coin to purchase, run and decommission the data center.... I'm saying that THAT is the only important measure of "efficiency" and that PUE and WEE are worthless to a business except for marketing. People who bow to this environmental impact stuff when making business decisions are not good at business. Where I'm all for being environmentally friendly when I can, in business Profit and Cash flow MUST be

        • For Pete's sake... I'm talking about ACCOUNTING here. What does it cost in dollars, or rubles, or bit coin to purchase, run and decommission the data center....

          Quit including "and decommission", and we can have a reasonable cost discussion. Otherwise, you are talking future value of materials used in the construction of the data center, and future costs of electronic recycling programs, and so on. And those can change drastically over a very few years.

          At issue is that a lot of the materials, particularly copper and rare earths, are commodity traded materials, and their value can fluctuate wildly as a result. As was seen by people breaking into buildings to rip

          • So, if it's unknowable with any certainty you want to just ignore the costs? That's not a good idea..

            You simply have to at least think about decommissioning costs, if you are going to be responsible in your business plan. Sure, you can ignore these costs and just plan to go bankrupt and let your creditors and share holders clean up the mess but I don't feel that is ethical and just going out of business is generally not the desired situation.

            You keep dropping into the supply chain and talking about raw m

            • You simply have to at least think about decommissioning costs, if you are going to be responsible in your business plan.

              My plan is: "There is a net positive margin of about 6% between what I plan to sell the datacenter to the scrap dealer, and what the scrap deal will make on it, considering only net present value". Therefore, my decommissioning costs are fixed, and give me a net positive income, and the scrap company also gets a net positive income.

              Sure, you can ignore these costs and just plan to go bankrupt and let your creditors and share holders clean up the mess but I don't feel that is ethical and just going out of business is generally not the desired situation.

              Don't be an idiot; if that were my plan, I'd just put the thing in a holding company in the first place, spin it off at the last minute, and let the holding company go bankrupt.

              • Google may indeed be engineering their own systems, but THEY don't build them, they have that done. They also don't build the components that go into the systems, they buy this stuff already made. Further they don't go out and produce the raw materials that go into the components that they are stuffing into the custom designed motherboards....

                But that doesn't change what I'm saying... There is a specific cost involved in setting up a data center. Then it costs you money to operate the thing, plus it cos

                • But that doesn't change what I'm saying... There is a specific cost involved in setting up a data center. Then it costs you money to operate the thing, plus it costs you to get rid of it.

                  NO.

                  It *does NOT* cost me to get rid of it.

                  I *MAKE* money when I get rid of a data center, because I *RECOVER* some of my sunk costs. People will happily pay me for my electronic components and materials that they are able to recover post recycling. My real estate has increased in value. The capitol improvements I made to the property still have value.

                  Why do you *insist* that I am not recovering any of my sunk costs when I get rid of a data center?!?!? These damn things are not like nuclear superfund cle

  • Water use certainly is an environmental impact factor ... if the data center is located somewhere where water is scarce. If the metric doesn't take into account where the center is located when evaluating externalities, then it's not really doing its job. Sure, blowing through millions of gallons a month is a problem in California, but in upstate New York it's not really an issue.

    • Water use certainly is an environmental impact factor ... if the data center is located somewhere where water is scarce. If the metric doesn't take into account where the center is located when evaluating externalities, then it's not really doing its job. Sure, blowing through millions of gallons a month is a problem in California, but in upstate New York it's not really an issue.

      Google just turns the thermostat up to 80, and has its data center techs wear shorts and Hawaiian shirts. The equipment doesn't fail any faster.

      Also, I was totally stymied by the supposed need for desalination, given that Google happily uses salt water in the cooling systems in several of its data centers; it's not like the computers care that the water be potable.

      Finally, I agree that some places need desalination plants -- it's just: those places are not data centers, they're agricultural areas. For exa

      • Salt water is hella corrosive. It's really not about potable water, it's about water which wants to eat through most anything.

        Now, I have no idea what Google has salt water contained in, but having lived in coastal areas and visited coastal areas ... salt water pretty much eats everything near it even if it isn't in direct contact.

        Pretty much most metal in contact with salt water is either going to need to get replaced often, have a sacrificial anode thingy, or be fairly constantly maintained and painted.

        P

        • Salt water is hella corrosive. It's really not about potable water, it's about water which wants to eat through most anything.

          Now, I have no idea what Google has salt water contained in, but having lived in coastal areas and visited coastal areas ... salt water pretty much eats everything near it even if it isn't in direct contact.

          You don't need to pump it inside, and you don't need to pump it through anything but PVC. In other words, all you have to do is get it from the cold spot in the ocean to the heat exchangers, and then back out into the ocean.

          Here's the video that tells what they did in 2011: http://www.tomshardware.com/ne... [tomshardware.com]

  • for a native Brit, headline is hilarious (Score:3)

    by ihtoit ( 3393327 ) on Wednesday August 05, 2015 @06:41PM (#50259721)

    I don't know if you Yanks get it, but yeah, I laughed until I squirted milk out my nose.

  • Evaporative cooling doesn't work where or when it is humid.

    Here in the summer its mostly humid.
     

  • /r/shitpost [reddit.com]

  • Actually PUE as a metric for comparison favours longer established datacentres too, compared to potentially better designed more efficient ones that have just been built. So it's a bit of a "perverse" metric.
    A room already filled up to capacity with IT equipment will score well on PUE because cooling, consumption etc will be balanced and close to it's design capacity, whereas a room that has just opened and has only begun to be filled up, will have power distribution and cooling equipment designed to delive

  • Because those are funny names!

  • critics say it is unfairly biased to sites in the Northern Hemisphere which can use evaporative cooling

    Does water evaporate backwards in the southern hemisphere, or something?

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