Five key elements of Data Center Infrastructure Utilization (IUE)

(TGGC) published the White paper "Infrastructure Use Efficiency (IUE)" in 2019. In the Green data center concept, TGGC has proposed a new metric: infrastructure utilization. IUE is designed to address important challenges faced by data center owners:

1) How to effectively use infrastructure resources to minimize operational risk;

2) Maximize the use of existing resources and avoid building or leasing new facilities when expensive resources are not fully utilized.

Infrastructure usage efficiency provides data center owners and managers with an effective way to assess the utilization of infrastructure resources, identify design or operational deficiencies, guide improvements in the use of infrastructure resources, reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), and improve reliability and availability.

IUE covers five main infrastructure resource elements:

(1) Electricity supply

(2) Power distribution

(3) Cooling capacity

(4) Cooling flow rate

(5) Number of U slots in the rack

TGGC says these five elements do not represent all resources, but TGGC worked with industry experts to identify them and incorporate them into infrastructure use efficiency. While these elements are relatively complex to use and less straightforward to understand than the PUE metric, the metric could benefit the entire data center industry if the industry works together to establish guidelines for the efficiency of infrastructure use, or build online tools.

At present, some element areas can already see industry efforts. For example, the number of U slots in a rack.

According to the data show that the construction of a data center, excluding the cost of civil construction, the average cost of each cabinet is about 100,000 yuan, if you can not effectively improve the utilization of the rack U-bit, it will cause a great waste of rack space resources, reduce the return on investment of the data center.

Now the use of "data center U-level assets and capacity digital monitoring technology" (also known as MC-RFID technology, has been awarded by the China Engineering Construction Standardization Association of Data center science and technology Achievement Award Progress Award), can achieve real-time monitoring and statistics of the number of U-bits, to provide decision-makers with accurate U-bit use number, utilization rate, etc.

According to statistics, the use of MC-RFID technology can achieve a U-level utilization increase of 5%-20%, which will be a major breakthrough in changing the efficiency of infrastructure use in the data center industry.