Google's PUE

Thu Oct 2 17:38:37 UTC 2008

The datacenter in Atlanta is located in Suwanee which is north of Atlanta.  
The Building is operated by Quality Technology Services 
(www.qualitytech.com).  I know since they occupy half of the building.

----------------------

Brian Raaen
Network Engineer

On Wednesday 01 October 2008, Alex Rubenstein wrote:
> I only quickly read this, but have the following question, should google
> like to answer it...
> 
> Of the six datacenters, where are they all physically located?
> 
> Someone should get on the bandwagon of having a PUE standard that is
> climate based. A PUE of 1.3 in the Caribbean is way impressive than 1.3
> in Quebec.
> 
> And, why the hell do people use PUE rather than DCIE? DCIE makes more
> sense. A PUE of 1.15 is DCIE of .86, which is somewhat easier to
> quantify in ones mind. Translation would be, "for every 100 watts into a
> site, 86 goes to the critical load."
> 
> I'd be interested to hear what economization methods they use. 
> 
> And, while they touch on how the water evaporates to cool their
> datacenters (a la cooling towers), they neglect to tell us how much
> water is consumed and evaporated (in a heated form) in to the
> atmosphere.
> 
> Don't take this as an attack on Google, but there is a lot more to a
> datacenter efficiency analysis than simple stating your PUE and some
> other data. For instance, if you have a higher PUE but consume no water,
> are you more eco-friendly? What about airside vs. waterside
> economization? Is a higher PUE acceptable if the power generation source
> is photovoltaic or wind (rather than coal or gas)? Do they do ice
> storage? If they are they using river water, what does heating that
> water affect?  
> 
> It's a good topic to talk about (and something I believe NANOG should
> focus on), but I'd love to see more nuts and bolts in the data from
> Google. 
> 
> 
> 
> > Google has released its PUE numbers:
> > 
> >   <http://www.google.com/corporate/datacenters/measuring.html>
> 
> 
> 