Metrics, they are not always perfect, but are a useful tool for us to measure our performance and improvement. PUE is a commonly used metric in the data centre industry, but there is room for more – and one of the most promising is called FVER.

PUE (power usage effectiveness) measures the waste in supporting mechanical and engineering equipment by assessing the ratio of overall power to IT equipment power. Despite a little marketing abuse and users moving some of their loads into the IT equipment, PUE has been a success for the industry, driving common M&E efficiencies from wasteful to rather efficient. Now, enter a new metric supported by the British Computer Society’s Data Centre Specialist Group, Fixed to Variable Energy Ratio, or FVER for short. FVER is not to be ignored; it’s the  brainchild of Liam Newcombe, the man who led the best practice element of the EU Code of Conduct for data centres. FVER attempts to target waste in the whole system (software, hardware, M&E and all) like PUE targets waste in M&E. FVER assumes your data centre is made up of a sum of two loads, a fixed load that would exist if the data centre was inactive, and a variable load that would be maxed out when the data centre was full to capacity. You can use measurement of output work and power consumption to establish (and if necessary interpolate) what these loads are and FVER is then calculated:

Source: Tech Week Europe