PUE

PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) is the ratio of the total amount of energy used by a computer data center facility to the energy delivered to computing equipment. An ideal PUE ratio would be 1.0: 100% of the energy delivered to the data center is used for computing. However, data centers require cooling systems, lighting and other overhead that will also consume some of this energy. As such, a PUE ratio for a conventional data center will always be greater than 1.0.

In a large data center, operational expenses (such as power bills) can often be enormous and even a greater burden than the initial cost of building the data center and buying the physical equipment itself. To reduce expenses therefore, companies will strive to reduce both the energy consumption of the physical server equipment itself as well as the consumption of energy required to house and cool this equipment. Traditional cooling infrastructure such as air conditioning systems use a lot of energy. Therefore companies are looking to reduce the PUE of their data centers in many different ways – such as using closed loop liquid cooling systems (instead of fan cooling) on the servers themselves, which are more efficient at cooling the server and therefore allow the servers to be operated at higher ambient temperatures (requiring less or no additional air conditioning), or even using liquid immersion cooling where the entire server rack is immersed in a non-conductive fluid for cooling. Other companies can reduce their PUE by locating their data center in a colder climate – such as northern Europe, Russia or Alaska, requiring less additional energy to reach a lower ambient temperature, and Microsoft is even experimenting with locating data centers under the ocean.

GIGABYTE has formed close partnerships with vendors of both closed loop liquid cooling systems (such as CoolIT and Asetek) as well as immersion cooling systems (such as LiquidStack and Submer) to offer a variety of different solutions to help customers reduce their PUE. Partnering with these companies allows GIGABYTE to offer our servers that have been modified, tested and validated to work with these different solutions to provide for quick and easy deployment.